The WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is the topic of a brand new play by the main Australian playwright Patricia Cornelius, which can make its world premiere in Melbourne subsequent yr.
Fact, which makes use of moments from Assange’s life to probe questions round freedom of knowledge and the silencing of whistleblowers, spans his years as a teenage hacker in Melbourne, the formation of WikiLeaks and his almost 14 years of jail, embassy confinement and home arrest within the UK – which resulted in June, when he entered a plea discount with the US over espionage expenses and returned to Australia a free man.
Assange was not consulted for Fact, Cornelius instructed Guardian Australia, however “he knows that it’s going to happen. I feel like it’s great to be independent from that [input].”
Fact will premiere at Melbourne’s Malthouse theatre in February. It’s one among seven works within the firm’s 2025 season, alongside an adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s gothic horror The Birds that can use binaural sound know-how, and a tackle the Greek delusion of Troy.
Malthouse’s inventive director Matthew Lutton says Fact springs from the identical nicely of “brilliant, fiery anger at injustice in the world” that has fuelled Cornelius’s four-decade physique of labor, which incorporates performs corresponding to Shit, Love and Savages.
“She has a great anger about the way our governments and society silence people that speak the truth,” Lutton stated.
The play will even tackle the rape and sexual assault allegations made by two Swedish girls in 2010, which Assange denied. No expenses have been introduced towards him, and the investigation was finally dropped by Swedish authorities – however Cornelius says it’s nonetheless prime of individuals’s minds.
“Even my bloody doctor told me, ‘What a pity that he was a rapist’,” she stated. “But I don’t think I ever felt like I had to defend him or denigrate him.”
The media has been prolific in appraising Assange’s private foibles – from his hygiene habits to his cat – whereas documentaries corresponding to Laura Poitras’s Danger have sought to grasp his motivations. However Cornelius sees this “fixation on the man and his personality” as a harmful distraction.
“It’s kind of a weird old-fashioned avoidance – ‘Look over there!’ rather than look exactly where we should be looking: that there was something [he] revealed, and the US wanted to punish him for it,” she stated.
Finally, the play is as a lot about Assange as “those who want to change the world and are punished for it”, Cornelius stated. The whistleblowers Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, who labored for the US military and Nationwide Safety Company respectively, will even be portrayed.
Fact will likely be directed by Cornelius’s longtime collaborator Susie Dee and have a forged of 5 actors, together with Aljin Abella, Emily Havea and Eva Seymour, enjoying all of the roles, together with a number of variations of Assange who will typically seem on stage concurrently.
“I’m so happy that at this point in my life I get to write a play that is overtly political,” Cornelius stated. “[Assange] is one of ours: whether you like him or not, he’s Australian, and that does connect us to him.
“It’s worth finding out [more about his story]. It’s worth our arts going there and having some clout.”
Fact headlines a Malthouse season targeted on “fantastic and fantasy worlds that audiences can escape into”, in accordance with Lutton, who will direct Tom Wright’s new play Troy and a one-woman adaptation of The Birds starring Paula Arundell.
For the latter, viewers members will take heed to a binaural sound design via headphones whereas Arundell narrates and embodies numerous characters on stage. “When the birds are attacking, it will sound like they’re pecking at your ear, and so I’m hoping it will be quite adrenaline-fuelling for the audience,” Lutton stated.
This system additionally contains Meow Meow’s cabaret tackle Hans Christian Andersen’s macabre fairytale The Purple Footwear; the Australian premiere of ECHO: Each Chilly-Hearted Oxygen, a hybrid theatre and dwell video work by the Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour (White Rabbit, Purple Rabbit); the world premiere of The Orchard, a radical reimagining of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard by the Melbourne collective Pony Cam (Burnout Paradise); and a revamped model of A Nightime Travesty, an “an epic First Nations vaudevillian musical nightmare” created by A Daylight Connection (Kamarra Bell-Wykes and Carly Sheppard), which was a success on the 2023 Yirramboi competition.
