Thorny ethical questions that plague the publishing industry don’t immediately seem the stuff of comedy, but American playwrights Gordon Farrell, Jeremy Kareken, and David Murrell have fashioned a sharp and very funny one from an unlikely source. Their plot is simple, and the comedy they elicit from it initially seems merely situational, but the complexities are embedded in the material and soon deepen and darken the play’s concerns.

Publisher at a prestigious literary magazine, Emily Penrose (Nadine Garner) has one of the finest pieces of long-form narrative non-fiction she’s ever published ready to go to print by Monday morning, a work by a brilliant if irascible writer John D’Agata (Steve Mouzakis). It opens with a teenage suicide by jumping from a Las Vegas tower, and expands to take in a whole city, its malaise and self-destructive tendencies. She just needs a fact-checker to go over it to root out any inaccuracies, so she puts unpaid intern Jim Fingal (Karl Richmond) to task. He has a three-day turnaround. Easy. But Jim takes his role as fact-checker very seriously, and unearths a myriad of inconsistencies in D’Agata’s piece. He also doesn’t seem to be able or willing to differentiate between the trivial and the highly problematic; for Jim, all the facts need to be true, poetic justifications be damned. It sets up an extremely volatile, and often hilarious, battle of wits and wiles.

Complicating the play’s conceit is its provenance. D’Agata is a real essayist, and Fingal really was hired to fact-check one of his articles. Together they wrote a non-fiction book of their experiences in grappling with the difference between fact and truth; they published it in 2012 under the title Lifespan of a Fact. The book was a partly fictionalised account of their working relationship, and the play further fictionalises the book. The implications are head-spinning.

Petra Kalive directs the three-hander with the precision you’d expect from non-fiction and the texture and attention to mood and musicality you get in the finest fiction. The pace crackles, and the tensions are beautifully parsed, but there is also plenty of room for reflection and even deep existential melancholia. The performances are electric. Garner is typically sublime; her timing and attention to character detail have never been better, but it is her ability to suggest layers of grief and conflict running beneath the surface that truly elevates her role here. She is one of the country’s finest comic actors, her brilliant clowning skills disguised almost by her command of naturalistic gestures. Mouzakis brings great lurching sadness to the role of the ageing genius; there is a sense that D’Agata knows the wind is no longer blowing in his direction but that there is some dignity in fighting lost causes.

Karl Richmond as Jim Fingal in Lifespan of a Fact (photograph by Jeff Busby)

The largest surprise is newcomer Richmond, making his MTC début here as the particular, and increasingly belligerent, fact checker. He opens brightly, a blinking, slightly befuddled innocent, but he subtly and persuasively shifts gear as the play progresses, growing in moral fervour, and ends as a genuine threat to the status quo. It’s a powerful representation of youthful vigour transforming itself into a kind of unyielding rectitude, and if not a star-making turn then certainly a very auspicious beginning for this fine young actor.

Andrew Bailey’s set is an exercise in ingenuity; it utilises the Fairfax Studio’s difficult apron stage to transformative effect. It starts as soulless Manhattan reflecting surface and opens out into a telling ramshackle Las Vegas trailer home, replete with fading sofas and crowded kitchenette. Like MTC’s Berlin before it, it shows just how impactful a set design can be on mood and character. Kat Chan’s costumes are equally smart and considered.

There is something reassuring about Lifespan of a Fact: two writers with vastly different approaches to the written word can collaborate, and three playwrights can then adapt that collaboration, the resultant work feeling so resolved and cohesive. The play quite brilliantly contrasts opposing views – ones that are mutually exclusive – and allows the audience to see the merit in both. The publishing industry is shown in all its cynicism and grubbiness, but the play itself and the people in it aren’t merely cheap or venal. They are grappling, not just with notions of truth and legacy, but with profoundly difficult ethical considerations. The play takes us right to the edge of a conundrum and leaves us there, staring out over the ledge, wondering how far the facts can take us.

Lifespan of a Fact continues at the Fairfax Studio (Arts Centre Melbourne) until 3 July 2021. Performance attended: 21 May. The Sydney Theatre Company will repeat it from 13 September to 23 October 2021.

This review is supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.