Review: Fake News at Sheffield Crucible Playhouse

Former journalist Osman Baig in Fake News at the Crucible Playhouse. Photo: Tristram Kenton

Fake news. Two little words bandied around so freely, and dangerously, these days, in an era of inane clickbait, faceless social media accounts, and the decline of trusted traditional journalism as we all once knew it.

Actor Osman Baig – star of one-man satirical show Fake News at the Crucible Playhouse in Sheffield on Tuesday – knows it as well as anyone.

He used to be a journalist himself, at BBC News, Sky News and CNN among others, before retraining as an actor and playwright. The man must be a glutton for a poorly-paid precarious profession.

His play began life as a sell-out show at the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe and has gone on to collect four star reviews since then.

Osman Baig in his one-man show Fake News at the Crucible Playhouse. Photo: Tristram Kenton

In an impressive hour of physical energy, mental concentration, and almost non-stop rapid-fire solo dialogue, Baig embodies the role of a nameless media mogul, a slick besuited newsroom boss here to impart his words of wisdom on the way we all consume and believe news online these days.

We, the audience, are his unpaid interns at fictional digital publication The Millennial Times, listening to a lecture in how the news is presented, from a man who didn’t just make it but accidentally almost broke it.

Baig flips deftly between portraying not just his own scoop-hungry character but also those of his silver-tongued unscrupulous boss – “facts, finesse, and finances!” she snarls at her protégés – his deer-loving horsey workmate, his privately educated posh boy colleague, and his gruff Yorkshire dad.

There are some resonant, funny, and often all too depressing themes in this witty discourse on the state of modern journalism.

The play also touches on racism, class, politics and privilege in an industry where 87 per cent of UK journalists are white.

But perhaps the best message comes at the end, when Baig opines that – despite what Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Prince Harry might have us believe – maybe there is no such thing as fake news.

Sure, sometimes, journalists make mistakes, occasionally big ones. But by and large good journalists are just ordinary people, working hard for little reward, going after the story, shining a light in the dark, and trying to give a voice to those who might otherwise never be heard in an echo chamber of incessant, noisy, angry online chatter.