Man in the Middle

Unimpressed as he was with his autobiography, maybe even Julian Assange himself would raise a smirk at his first dramatic portrayal occurring in Ron Elisha’s self-styled ‘wikiplay’, Man in the Middle. It's a bio-play at heart, largely following Assange through his UK-based extradition proceedings, but it calls in on the international political context, the origins of Wikileaks and the family in Australia for whom he is virtually a stranger.

Darren Weller, the first ever actor to play Assange, is retained from the original production and he is a highly watchable presence, finding the terrified, over-sexed and over-educated teenager beneath the subject’s prickly, literate charm.

Director Lucy Skilbeck has drilled her substantial cast into an energetic ensemble – the pep and vigour of Andrew Leung proving the pick of the bunch – who industriously explore every avenue of Elisha’s extensive research.

And what research it is – everything from clandestine negotiations over Time’s ‘Person of the Year’ to Barack Obama’s personal demons. There’s simply too much here and much of it, if not outright conjecture, is certainly fanciful and unnecessary. Extraneous characters appear for little more reason than to announce themselves and their function, cluttering a show that is at its best when stripped-down. The narrative loses coherence in the first half and only barely recovers before a video wall is employed to do seemingly very little, adding to the badly muddled dramaturgy.

For all Elisha’s recent wiki-ing of Man in the Middle (which to a layman might seem remarkable similar to an everyday ‘edit’), it still requires a major clean-up for quality.http://www.spoonfed.co.uk/spooners/dominicdinezza-22612/

Dominic DiNezza