Mike Bartlett is one of our most protean playwrights. On telly: Doctor Foster; on stage: vision and verse in King Charles III. Now he turns his attention to recent politics and to the metaphysics underlying them. Wild begins as a play about the dilemma of a whistleblower; it ends as a drama about the erosion of identity.
Or so James Macdonald’s skilful production makes us believe. Almost. The real question of interest is about the play, rather than in it. To what extent does a drama become more striking because of knowledge contained in its final moments? How much light can be cast retrospectively? Most of Wild is made up of wiry dialogues in a bland setting. A young American man, an Edward Snowden figure, has uncovered secrets that brought wrath on his head, and is now holed up in a Russian hotel room. Jack Farthing gives him the right air of wary doggedness. He is approached by two rum characters who offer vague promises of protection. Caoilfhionn Dunne whips around him like a supple, seductive cockroach; all in black, bent over as if to pounce. She is followed by John Mackay, lean, levelly spoken and threatening. Each claims not to know the other. They may come from a Wikileaks-style organisation; they may be more sinister. They may simply have popped out of a theatrical kit called make your own enigma.
So far, routinely menacing. But in the closing minutes, the audience is forced into a dramatic change of perspective. It would be unfair to leak the details of this most exciting passage, which involves the brilliant designer Miriam Buether. It suggests the audience should consider what they have seen as not merely political but metaphysical. Too late. It seems to me a rug-pulling exercise. Ingenious rather than truly alarming.
• Wild is at Hampstead theatre, London NW3 until 23 July
