BWW Reviews: THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY OF STEVE JOBS Plays Hightide Festival

Owing something to the style of Spalding Gray and the anger of Michael Moore, Mike Daisey's extraordinarily sustained monologue goes to the very core of Apple, of its cultish followers, and ultimately of the 21st century global capitalism of which it is so potent a symbol.

Sat behind a table, Daisey speaks directly to us - he doesn't need the pages of notes he occasionally turns over and he tells us more than once that he is in control and can say what he likes because this is theatre (more of which later). He tells us of a youth spent in geekish idolatory of computers, machines that nevertheless frustrated him as much as they did the rest of us. There's a bit computing history that fans of Bob Cringeley's writing will enjoy and then he gets stuck into the substance of the show - Apple and Steve Jobs.

There's laughs aplenty at his own expense, at the expense of an industry not short of self-regard and at the expense of Steve Jobs and Apple, all told with an attitude that veers between admiration and abhorrence, before the bonhomie fades away and the anger takes over. Daisey's accounts of what goes on at Apple's Chinese manufacturing plants, specifically the now notorious Foxconn plant in Shenzen, a silent but deadly 21st century Coketown, deals with misery and death, all the more powerfully after the gags and the giggling.

"The Agony and The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs" fulfils both of its ambitions. It certainly entertains - as it should - with a master storyteller in peak form; and it makes us think about what kind of world we have tumbled into, dependent on cheap technology that depends on the unseen misery of fellow human beings. However, all is not satisfactory - and it shouldn't be in a show that has plenty of targets and doesn't play safe. I have no problem with criticisms of early versions of the show that included incidents not witnessed by Daisey - as the man said, it's theatre, not a Pilgeresque piece of investigative journalism, and the truth (if not quite the whole truth and nothing but the truth) is told. I have more of a problem with Apple's approach to industry being presented as something extreme, perhaps unique, when it is nothing more than that pursued by the East India Company and, less successfully and sometimes less ruthlessly, by countless firms since then. "Buy low and sell high" is what business is about - and until someone comes up with a better way, we're stuck with it. Yes there's metaphorical blood welling through my keyboard, but it's everywhere isn't it?      

 

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