The Little Theatre
Southwark Playhouse
Jan 10th – 28th 2023
You wouldn’t tell a surgeon how to do his job on the operating table.
You wouldn’t tell a pilot how to land a plane.
So why – at a time when global affairs are more remarkable than ever – does the world thinks it knows better than the people who report on it?
This is the story of how the news is really made – and broken – from someone who has lived and breathed it all.
A budding journalist lands a dream internship at the country’s biggest online news organisation. There, he stumbles on an earth-shattering story and decides to click publish. There’s just one problem: it’s completely untrue.
A sell-out one-man show at the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe, listed as a Must-See by The Guardian & Telegraph, Fake News is the story of our time from journalist turned actor & playwright Osman Baig.
“Indubitably good news”
★★★★ Mark Lawson, The Guardian
“Hilarious… A cutting media satire which addresses relevant themes with aplomb”
★★★★ Daily Express
★★★★★ London Theatre Reviews
“A big satirical scoop”
Dominic Cavendish, Telegraph
About the team
Osman began his career as a journalist and TV producer, with staff roles at CNN, Sky News and Al Jazeera, as well as BBC News and Bloomberg – covering every major world news story.
He then retrained as an actor at Drama Studio London, before taking on roles including: Julius Caesar & Coriolanus (Royal Shakespeare Company), Richard III (alongside Ralph Fiennes & Vanessa Redgrave, Almeida Theatre & Ulysses Theatre, Croatia) & Boy (Almeida Theatre).
Fake News is his first play as a writer. He is working on a feature adaptation.
Why “fake news”?
Osman Baig..
“We are living in an unprecedented era in which scrutiny and discourse around the media are at equally unprecedented levels. After all, everyone from Vladimir Putin to Prince Harry has something to say about the Age of Information – and how that so readily can become misinformation.
I wrote this play because I needed to show the world that legitimate journalism truly matters – and that those who create it do so not for power or profit, but because they have a fundamental belief that no person should be denied a voice.
Andy Warhol said in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. Now it feels like everyone is a journalist for 15 minutes. The amount of times I see people ‘correcting’ headlines on social media, or espousing niche angles of stories to try to justify some sense of wider ‘agenda’ is alarming to me, and speaks to a greater mistrust not just in the media, but in our own leaders. And after the past few years, who could blame people?”
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