Sumner Theatre, Melbourne
May 10, 2018

Mike Bartlett’s Wild premiered in London in 2016, three years after the Edward Snowden affair that it’s very openly inspired by. Two years on, this MTC production arrives in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook scandal, making this play’s darkly comic exploration of freedom and authority in a world of mass digital surveillance as topical as ever. It’s a clever dialogue-driven three-hander that’s finely executed, not least because of the denouement’s coup de théâtre.

Nicholas Denton, Toby Schmitz and Anna Lise Phillips. Photo © Jeff Busby

The scene is a Moscow hotel room, where young American whistleblower Andrew is visited by a woman who seems to be offering support on behalf of Wikileaks. She calls herself Miss Prism, a nod to both the NSA surveillance program Snowden revealed, and Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. There’s a Wildean conversational wit about Bartlett’s script – the kind one yearns to read afterwards – but its title probably isn’t a reference to the great playwright so much as the wild ride Andrew has embarked on.

Static though the play is for nearly all its 90 minutes, word...