Have you ever felt that someone was watching you?
Have you coincidentally been recommended a video on YouTube or seen an advertisement for something immediately after you happened to be talking about it? Surely it is just paranoia or some tinfoil hat conspiracy theory, but you can’t shake the idea that maybe the government is overstepping the mark. Yeah, as it turns out there may very well be a reason for that.
In 1987, Australian Julian Assange began down a road of back doors and “ethical hacking”. With a desire to expose the secrets and lies of the world, he joined forces with many likeminded individuals. This saw him become the figurehead of the largest and most notorious online repository of leaked documents and exposés. When WikiLeaks began operation in 2006, it wasn’t long before controversy followed.
Their stated goal was to force organisations whether political, religious or private to reduce dishonesty and abuse. The more unjust an organisation, the more they fear their secrets being exposed to the world. But the powerful also have weapons of their own to control the narrative.
In 2007, Chelsea Manning leaked evidence of US war crimes in Afghanistan (as well as leaking anything else they could get their hands on). In 2013, government contractor for the NSA Edward Snowden leaked evidence of global surveillance programs and breaches of personal privacy. All these scandals shocked the world and revealed people’s greatest fears about those with power.
The history of WikiLeaks is filled with people like this. People who wanted to reveal the truth to the public when silence would have been so much easier. For his troubles, Assange spent over a decade under accusations of sexual assault, much of that holed up in an Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Maybe he was guilty, or maybe he should have just kept his head down? But is a world without whistle-blowers one that we want to live in?
Possibly Australia’s most celebrated playwright, Patricia Cornelius returns with her new work, this time about Australia’s most controversial activist. Teaming up once more with long-time collaborator and director Susie Dee, Trust is a story about courage; the courage to stand up and speak out when you know something is wrong and the only way to change it is to let the entire world know.
Trust hits the ground running, somewhat literally, with the show starting with characters sprinting in darkness as “RESIST”, “RESIST” is projected in giant letters across the huge screen that’s looming over the stage. This is the theme Trust often returns to as the message for us to take away from the story of WikiLeaks.
I caught Cornelius and Dee‘s previous work My Sister Jill. A semi-autobiographical look at growing up in an Australian household post WW2 with a father suffering from PTSD. While that was a much more literal straightforward story, Trust takes a very different approach to the history of Julian Assange, WikiLeaks, its members, its message and its biggest moments. Showing the versatility of Cornelius as a playwright and Dee as a director.
The five cast members of Trust all play Assange (sometimes all at once), his colleagues, his accusers, and even other figures completely removed from WikiLeaks altogether. Emily Havea, Tomáš Kantor, James O’Connell, Eva Rees and Eva Seymour work wonderfully together as an ensemble picking up mid-sentence where the others left off. But if it sounds like it would get messy, it can. It may take a beat as you ask yourself, “Which character is talking now? Assange or someone else?”.
It’s only a minor gripe however, and it’s easy to overlook this with just how great the cast are. Often not even playing characters, they are voicing the idea of WikiLeaks itself and the importance of divulging information to the public. How can we make informed decisions as a species if that information is kept under wraps to protect the powerful and corrupt?
The history of WikiLeaks, its founder, his legal woes, its whistleblowers experiences in prison etc. All of it may be a bit much for a single 80-minute play to cover, so Trust does feel like Cliff’s notes on the overall story. Even more, when you add in several monologues which portray another member of the public who is affected by oppression, WikiLeaks was fighting against it. A family keeping abuses by the Catholic Church secret, a woman who is stalked by an ex-boyfriend with more spy gadgets than James Bond!
But this is why the unconventional framing of Truth suits it so well. A play twice the length still couldn’t cover everything adequately. So specific elements have been zeroed in on to better elucidate the message that whistleblowers like Snowden and activists like Assange strive for. The set design by Matilda Woodroofe combined with the video design by Meri Blazevski highlight this terrifying paranoid world.
Cameras, microphones and more cameras are littered across the room with some being for show but many also functional. That giant screen on stage becoming a window into the surveillance state the NSA and others wished to impose on us all. From the opening of the show, cameras peer down like a satellite spying on the actors from high up above. This doesn’t even go into the harrowing moments when the leaked ‘Collateral Murder’ footage from Afghanistan shows an airstrike on unsuspecting targets. Truly a breathtaking moment of ‘Truth’ for many in the audience.
For its ideals, Truth and Cornelius herself do show an amount of bias, however slight. The thing which made WikiLeaks such a target was that it aimed to take no side whatsoever. This made it an enemy of both the left and the right as each found themselves benefiting from one leak and then the target of the next. While the unconventional format of Cornelius‘ play allows it to cover such an epic scope in a short amount of time, a lot of context and details get lost along the way. Simply put, this feels like Patricia Cornelius‘ truth in more ways than one.
With the world’s political climate being hotter than ever and governments being caught with their pants down in public almost daily, it’s scary to think about what may be happening behind closed doors. This is what Julian Assange and WikiLeaks was all about. It is why whistleblowers have been so important, long before Assange pulled his first shifty keystroke on his home computer.
Patricia Cornelius’ Truth is a celebration and tribute to that very ideal. Assange for all his faults inspired others to follow in his footsteps and it looks like we may need that in this world, now more than ever. Truth may be an objective story told through a particular lens, but it is a fascinating and powerful call to action all the same.
It may be easier to stay silent but what would you do if you knew of an injustice and could help by letting the world know about it?
Truth is currently playing at Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne until the 8th of March.
For more information and ticketing, visit:
https://www.malthousetheatre.com.au/whats-on/season-2025/truth
Photography by Pia Johnson.
