Whistleblowers: are they freedom fighters or enemies of the State? The answer to that question might not just hinge on your political beliefs, but also your perception of reality.
The once outlandish ravings of crackpot conspiracists have been proven startlingly accurate in recent years, thanks to the revelations of truth crusaders like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden. And yet despite this global scandal, it could be argued that the use of mass-surveillance may provide protections that justify such a betrayal of our personal liberty. It seems truth is not an absolute but rather a spectrum, and blissful ignorance may well, for some, be the preferable end of that scale.
There's an uncannily similar shifting of awareness found in Dean Bryant's direction of Mike Bartlett's Wild, not just in the beats of the narrative, but also in the tenor of his staging. What first appears as a fictionalised retelling of a familiar whistleblower story, charting a tense but somewhat predictable course, suddenly sends the audience careering on an utterly unexpected vector that brilliantly lifts the veil on many of Bryant's stylistic choices.
In much the same way as Lucy Kirkwood's The Children, which repurposed the meltdown of the Fukushima Nuclear Power Station, Bartlett's storytelling also borrows from true events, for example in his imagined docudrama about the future King of England, Charles III. In the case of Wild, he summons Laura Poitras's documentary Citizenfour, the remarkable film that captured the moment Snowden exposed the massive covert surveillance being carried out by the US and its allies.
Andrew (Bartlett's Snowden allegory, played superbly here by Nicholas Denton) is hiding out in a Moscow hotel room, having just blown the lid off a clandestine intelligence operation in his native America. Evoking - but never specifically naming - Julian Assange and Wikileaks, two representatives separately visit Andrew, seemingly to assist the fugitive escape Government retribution. And yet, these gestures of help are loaded with mind-games, subterfuge, spycraft and insidious intimidation. Andrew finds himself rapidly changed from a man who knew too much, into a man who knows nothing at all.
Bryant balances this Kafka-via-Orwell cat and mouse game with performances of almost pantomimic proportions. Anna Lise Phillips as the mysterious George Prism - an alias, it's quickly revealed - is painfully British, and yet somehow manages to be both delightfully befuddled and a master Svengali. Her male counterpart (Toby Schmitz) - also named George, also an alias - plays a straighter game, albeit a charmingly foppish one. This, however, only draws Andrew into a bleaker picture of the dangers he now faces.
So far, so Snowden, although Bartlett does effectively use the trope as a vehicle to explore the nature of freedom, privacy, and democratic privilege; it's fascinating stuff, if not a bit knowingly zealous. But in a brilliantly apt twist, these arguments become merely the smokescreen for an even more terrifying logic. With a jaw-dropping coup de theatre, courtesy of Andrew Bailey's ingenious set, Bryant manages to warp the fabric of reality in a way that feels inexplicably visceral. There are perhaps a few too many kitschy, overly technical flourishes to this stage magic, but this does little to diminish the overall intention. The performances of this pitch-perfect three-hander are so deftly calibrated from start to finish, they achieve the exact balance of sardonic humour and chilling intelligence to draw out the utmost intensity from Wild's final cadence. Existential crises have never been so thrilling.
Melbourne Theatre Company presents Wild until 9 Jun at Southbank Theatre.
