One of the more trite things we say
about art is that it is more real than reality, truer than the truth.
But how does it work when truth is its very theme yet its subject is
also an area where we do not and perhaps cannot know that truth? Ron
Elisha comes at it from both directions in
Man In The Middle, his version
(formerly known as
Stainless Steel
Rat) of the Julian Assange/Wikileaks affair.
At times (for much of the first act, though not always intentionally)
he resorts to cartooning. Assange himself is the only character
unambiguously identified by name, but almost all the others are readily
identifiable, including David Cameron, Barack Obama, Bradley Manning,
Mark Zuckerberg and, in one scene, even husband and wife Geoffrey
Robertson QC and Kathy Lette on Bondi beach. And, in order to
accommodate so many characters in a cast of eight (only fellow
Queenslander Darren Weller as Assange does not take multiple roles),
portrayals have to be broad-brush. There are German and Russian accents
you could cut with a knife, an excessively hawkish Obama (with a
Southern drawl, to boot), an ulster-wearing lawyer and so on. But
although we can put names to these figures, we do not necessarily know
what they are like. This is crucially so in the central case of
Assange, which means that the fundamental nature of caricature – that
it works by exaggerating
familiar
characteristics – is at sea here.
And when it grows serious, Elisha’s script by and large goes plonk.
Some 30 seconds into the play, Assange’s sometime Wikileaks colleague
Daniel Domscheit-Berg admonishes, “We’re journalists, Julian, we’re
supposed to be dispassionate,” which sets the tone for a couple of
hours more of sporadic sententiousness. For every sharp line or two
(mostly uttered either by Assange or Robertson), there are several
which one feels have been typed with a lot of Initial Capital Letters.
Twice in the closing minutes Assange is given a “What Is Truth?” riff
which would leave Pontius Pilate open-mouthed. In Lucy Skilbeck’s
production, the play is an effective whistle-stop tour of the last
couple of years of events, but it tells us nothing new (except the
perspective of Assange's estranged, grown-up son Daniel, played by
Andrew Leung) and shows us nothing reliable, and rather than being
conceptually fitting the latter point is fatal.
Written for the Financial
Times.