"CMI is an edgy performance devised from the Senate Select Committee on a Certain Maritime Incident, the inquiry into the "children overboard" scandal. In CMI six acting Senators wrestle with their wills, their words, their politics and each other. The Inquiry talks the talk that numbs the intellect and paralyses the body’s capacity for outrage. CMI is a public act of outrage, a staging of outrageous acts, a guided tour along the treacherous border separating cool heads from icy cold rage. CMI is heartbreaking and hilarious, a horribly funny tragedy". (from program notes)

CMI is all of that. This is something unique – a play built almost entirely around the Hansard transcript of the Senate Select Committee into a Certain Maritime Incident, which spent seven months in 2002 investigating the "children overboard" scandal and the tragic sinking of the boat known as "SIEV X" that drowned 353 asylum-seekers trying to reach Christmas Island.

The play is hard to categorise - it is in turns a satire, a slapstick comedy, a stark tragedy, a wild loopy ride through the dark side of the Australian Senate. As I watched the first night I was reminded of "Through the Looking Glass" – this was a Senate Committee as Lewis Carroll might have conceived it, a Red Queen’s court of justice or a Mad Hatter’s tea party.

Yet this play is far more than an undergraduate romp through politics (and the writers and performers are in fact not undergraduates, but theatre teaching professionals at Sydney University). There is a real artistic integrity and seriousness of purpose in this play.

Two disclaimers here:

1. One of the characters is called "Tony Kevin". He uses my words in the CMI, but he is not me. He is younger and far better-looking than me, and what happens to him in the play bears no resemblance to anything that happened to me in real life – at least, I don’t think so.

2. I had nothing to do with the play’s conception or production – it all came as a complete surprise to me. (And, a delicious irony – it was financially assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council.)

Political theatre based on real events is tricky. It worked in "The trials of Oscar Wilde". But it can easily become didactic and clunky. CMI elegantly avoids those traps.

We see Senators who are bored, tired, cynical, doing deals, boozing, flirting … nothing like the real Senate, of course. And we see flashes of shocked bewilderment and horror when some of them recognise what they are actually hearing from official witnesses.

For me, a lot of this play is about the limits of cognition – how much of what we think is a rational objective process of observing and ordering facts is really conditioned by our subjective value filters, that determine what we can "hear" and what we have subconsciously chosen not to "hear". And what that tells us about our political and judicial processes of establishing accountability for great crimes committed in Australia’s area of care.

A metaphor for this in the play is the CMI committee table itself: It has a wild life of its own, advancing threateningly on witnesses who transgress the unspoken boundaries of what can be said in testimony, spinning round in wild circles when the evidence becomes especially confronting, as if to ask "What am I hearing here? This cannot be true."

Sophisticated use of video backdrops supplements the action on stage. The sense of a Committee going round in circles is nicely suggested by endless tracking shots around Canberra’s Parliament House, and circling around a claustrophobic technospace without windows that might represent a war room. (And for those who know the real story well, suggestive also of HMAS Adelaide’s aimless 22-hour circular tow of SIEV 4 with 220 people at risk on board, until it finally sank).

The backdrop changes to shots of a dark heaving sea, then the famous Defence intelligence review maritime surveillance maps coming in and out of focus, and finally we see – drowning children.

There are plenty of broad laughs to help the medicine go down. Neat cross-gender casting helps sustain the weird mood of the play. Nikki Heywood silkily plays a character called "Senator Brandis", and later she delivers a memorably Amazonian performance as "Jane Halton". Deborah Pollard doubles as "Admiral Smith" and "Senator Faulkner". David Williams puts in good performances as the beleaguered "Commander Norman Banks" and as a tough "Senator Mason ".

I am reluctant to say very much more about the play in this review, for fear of spoiling the surprises of production and storyline that will add to audiences’ enjoyment; for this is a play that deserves to be seen, not read about. Were I writing after its run ends, I could comment on a lot more.

In its own zany way, it packs in more essential truth about the CMI inquiry than anything I have read or seen so far. It uses the CMI Hansard in a coherent and recognisable chronological context. In effect, it leaves off at about 1 May 2002. (Maybe by that time, the authors felt they had read just about all the Hansard they could take). At the end of the play, we are left with a stark representation of what the CMI might have really all been about.

Dramaturg Paul Dwyer and the version 1.0 team have brilliantly gone where most writers about Australian politics do not yet dare to go - deep into the treacherous drowning waters of Australia’s Operation Relex. The real CMI was about far more than just the investigation of falsified photographs of a sea rescue. Finally, the audience is left in no doubt about what the real Certain Maritime Incident was in October 2001 – it was the, still unsolved, sinking of SIEV X.

Canberra, 31 March 2004