When Aaron was nine he took the diary of his teenage neighbour Billy. Billy was so enraged to discover his secrets had been read that he held Aaron over the edge of a huge drop.
The years pass, it is now 2012 and Billy works in prisons providing drama therapy, while Aaron is a hacktivist being hounded by the FBI for having hacked a website full of publicly funded academic knowledge and making it all free.
Aaron wants Billy to help him write a play about Chelsea Manning, the US army whistleblower who released 750,000 secret documents to WikiLeaks, exposing US foreign policy double-dealings and war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. The proposed play, set on Barack Obama’s final day in the Oval Office, will explore the differences between the senator who campaigned for more transparency and the president who clamped down on whistleblowers.
With Manning currently serving a 35-year sentence in jail and facing possible further charges relating to her suicide attempt in July, this intelligent, thoughtful play from US company the Representatives couldn’t be more urgent or topical. Its play-within-a-play construction is a little tricksy, and it often feels a mite earnest. It really needs longer than its one-hour running time to develop and breathe. But in tying together the cases of Manning and Aaron Swartz, who killed himself in 2013, it describes the lengths to which government authorities will go to hound those they think are a threat, and raises fascinating questions about information, who owns it, and what you should do with it if you have it.
When the nine-year-old Aaron took Billy’s journal, he did it with the best of intentions but, whatever the motive, was Billy right to feel outraged by his behaviour? Was dangling him over a great drop the right way to deal with it or did it just turn him into a bully? The tension between the personal and the political is constantly being exposed in this play – through Billy’s fears of coming to the attention of the authorities and his desire to protect himself and his family, and also in the final White House encounter in which Obama the president is revealed as a different man to Obama the father.
There is some good stuff here to do with power and responsibility: do we want or expect our leaders to listen to the world’s dirty little secrets, so we can sleep quietly at night? It also raises questions about what constitute treason and public interest. But the drama is way overstuffed. And while the performances of E James Ford as Billy and Matt Steiner as Aaron keep the thing afloat, there are times when it feels as if it might sink under the weight of its own good intentions and its determination to keep some great injustices in the public eye.
•At the Space on Niddry St, Edinburgh, until 27 August. Box office: 0131-226 0000.
