Waterloo East Theatre 9 February – 6 March. Reviewed by Claire Roderick
This play made me worry about my political leanings. By the end I was rooting for the NSA – at least they were funny and had the best lines.
Snowden and the journalists come across as grey and joyless. Snowden’s motivation was ethical and patriotic but here his repeated justifications for his actions become trite and sanctimonious. The jumps between key events following 9/11 and in Snowden’s career influencing his decision to go public are jarring and the whole thing becomes a mishmash of good dialogue lost among a misjudged cacophony of noise and movement that becomes increasingly more irritating. The security briefings amuse at first, with endless mind-numbing acronyms and tubthumping rhetoric, but feel overused (a lovely exception being the GCHQ man with his schoolboy one-upmanship), and the difference between Snowden’s idea of patriotism and his colleagues’ more gung-ho attitude is hit home with a sledgehammer far too many times.
The second act is a little calmer and more coherent (apart from revisiting the worst excesses of act one verbatim to signal where we are in the timeframe – you’ll wish they hadn’t), dealing with the lead up to publication of the leaked material. There are moments of tension and humour but then it all gets a bit meta and sermon like at the end. Thankfully the cast all deal admirably with what they are given and just about carry it off.
This story is relevant, interesting and should be told – just not like this please. I for one was glad when the final whistle was blown.