Whistleblower review – a timely first staging of Edward Snowden’s story
As the UK government, with cross-party support, began hurrying legislation through parliament to prevent communications service-providers from deleting your emails, texts and phone calls that government agencies and the police would like to read, it could hardly be a better night for the premiere of Richard Roques’s play about Edward Snowden.
Snowden is the former NSA employee who blew the whistle on US security services who, with the help of British intelligence, were engaged in covert mass-surveillance programmes, snooping on the everyday communications of millions – activities they denied.
There is a telling moment in Roques’s play when Snowden (Ben Fisher), increasingly disturbed by what he has uncovered, and disappointed by the Obama government’s failure to deliver promised transparency, tells his father that he may read his emails. “Go ahead, I have nothing to hide,” says Snowden Sr airily. Of course, it’s that complacency about the actions of our democratic institutions that makes their abuse of personal liberties all the more shocking. The argument that those with nothing to hide have nothing to fear was one used by the Stasi in East Germany, where surveillance was a tool of population control.
Roques’s play is sturdy rather than thrilling, informative rather than groundbreaking, but in Alexander McConnell’s production, Whistleblower is always watchable. Events unfold with a thriller-like momentum as Snowden finds himself caught between the good life he has made for himself in Hawaii, and the dawning realisation that he can’t live with himself if he keeps quiet and does nothing.
There are times when the size and scope of this large-cast production is almost too ambitious for its own good. The spirits of other whistleblowers including Chelsea (previously Bradley) Manning float in and out – they would benefit from a tighter focus. But Whistleblower is a gripping story about a man who never set out to be a hero and who, like other whistleblowers before him, has paid a high price for telling the truth.
Read the review on the Guardian
Whistleblower at the Waterloo East Theatre, SE1
This biodrama about Edward Snowden is premiering even as the permit that temporarily allowed him to hole up in Russia nears expiration. The clock is ticking. Snowden’s lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, has just revealed that the US-born formerNational Security Agency contractor and leaker of classified information has asked Moscow to extend his asylum for another year. Snowden could, otherwise, face extradition to the United States and decades of imprisonment.
As for Richard Roques’s new play, Whistleblower might benefit from being shortened. The storytelling can feel straggly. Droves of cameo characters, including Snowden’s parents, girlfriend and colleagues, government honchos, journos and Chelsea…