"I'm not particularly interesting."
That’s a bold statement for a main character to be making in the opening scene of a play, especially while she's introducing herself to the audience. It's the sort of thing a person only admits to when they know it’s entirely untrue. The faux-humbleness of an a-lister wearing a name-badge to a celeb-party (yes, I'm looking at you Brad Pitt - don't for a second think I was fooled by your Oscar-baiting mock-modesty).
But Lucy Roslyn's Laura isn't an actor with a steely eye on an Academy Award. She's a journalist covering the Hong Kong protests. And she's not after fame, or even glory. She really believes in what's she's doing. When she speaks about her work, it's with the kind of fervour usually reserved for the newly converted. All grand vision and awed expressions.
But such zeal is born of more than nice articles about dogs wearing hand-knitted sweaters, and we are soon whisked back to see our heroines origin story for ourselves.
After an exciting start, with Laura a self-aware narrator, Jingan Young's Life and Death of a Journalist leaves the thrill of a meta Hong Kong behind and drags us back to a London built solidly behind the fourth-wall.
Here we rediscover Laura, desperate to write, if only to pay the rent. Just as things are looking really painful, on the verge of being forced to move into a very naice one-bedroom flat courtesy of her boyfriend's (Robert Bradley) rich dad, she's offered the writing gig that dreams are made of. A chance to get her words out there and to be the pointy stick that jabs at the CCP. A small catch: China is funding it.
But that's alright. She's been assured she won't be censored. And isn't this what she always wanted?
There's no prizes for guessing that it won't take long for the funders to want a return on their investment. A small change of wording (I mean... who even notices whether someone's called a protester or a rioter?)… The posting of a confession video (even if it s footage of her close friend)… That's all fine. It'll work itself out in the end. Once they learn to trust her, and let her write her long-reads on the use of torture to force (or is it just ‘extract'?) confessions. Which they totally will. When the time is right.
This gradual chipping away of personal morals should be a gripping watch, but too often we are siphoned off into the slow destruction of Laura's more personal relationships. When we see Laura and her long-suffering boyfriend in the same room, it's hard to see what could have ever brought them together in the first place. Laura's reactions to him are so preformative, complete with mock-accents and dramatic gestures, they seem to be stuck in a perpetual first date. Or, given that he at one point asks her where she sees them in five years, quite possibly a job interview.
But even that feels almost sensible in a world where jobs are offered in casual conversations and Laura's boss (Melissa Woodbridge) ricochets between providing an almost parental all-knowing role, and handing out the tequila shots - plucked out from underneath an overturned chair.
The rest of the stage is strewn with rubbish. Discarded bottles and those aforementioned fallen chairs. There are boards leaning against the wall, plastered with the stencilled message stating that "They can't kill us all." Hints at the dissent and violence happening on the other side of the world, which are otherwise only allowed to appear onstage in the scene transitions as the cast go into slow-mo moments of revolt.
If it sounds like a lot of things are happening in this play, you'd be right. Perhaps too much for a story that comes in at well under an hour. It's the characters who suffer, forced to spend much of their time explaining what the hell the political situation actually is in China for the benefit of the audience rather than getting down to the business of having a backstory.
It's a frustrating watch. Lucy Roslyn is an engaging actor, and Laura more interesting than she claims to be. I suspect, like so many writers, she could have done with not being constrained within the confines of such a stingy word-count.
Life and Death of a Journalist plays at VAULT Festival from 25 February - 1 March