The WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is the subject of a new play by the leading Australian playwright Patricia Cornelius, which will make its world premiere in Melbourne next year.
Truth, which uses moments from Assange’s life to probe questions around freedom of information and the silencing of whistleblowers, spans his years as a teenage hacker in Melbourne, the formation of WikiLeaks and his nearly 14 years of prison, embassy confinement and house arrest in the UK – which ended in June, when he entered a plea bargain with the US over espionage charges and returned to Australia a free man.
Assange was not consulted for Truth, Cornelius told Guardian Australia, but “he knows that it’s going to happen. I feel like it’s great to be independent from that [input].”
Truth will premiere at Melbourne’s Malthouse theatre in February. It is one of seven works in the company’s 2025 season, alongside an adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s gothic horror The Birds that will use binaural sound technology, and a take on the Greek myth of Troy.
Malthouse’s artistic director Matthew Lutton says Truth springs from the same well of “brilliant, fiery anger at injustice in the world” that has fuelled Cornelius’s four-decade body of work, which includes plays such as Shit, Love and Savages.
“She has a great anger about the way our governments and society silence people that speak the truth,” Lutton said.
The play will also address the rape and sexual assault allegations made by two Swedish women in 2010, which Assange denied. No charges were brought against him, and the investigation was ultimately dropped by Swedish authorities – but Cornelius says it is still top of people’s minds.
“Even my bloody doctor told me, ‘What a pity that he was a rapist’,” she said. “But I don’t think I ever felt like I had to defend him or denigrate him.”
The media has been prolific in appraising Assange’s personal foibles – from his hygiene habits to his cat – while documentaries such as Laura Poitras’s Risk have sought to understand his motivations. But Cornelius sees this “fixation on the man and his personality” as a dangerous distraction.
“It’s kind of a weird old-fashioned avoidance – ‘Look over there!’ rather than look exactly where we should be looking: that there was something [he] revealed, and the US wanted to punish him for it,” she said.
Ultimately, the play is as much about Assange as “those who want to change the world and are punished for it”, Cornelius said. The whistleblowers Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, who worked for the US army and National Security Agency respectively, will also be portrayed.
Truth will be directed by Cornelius’s longtime collaborator Susie Dee and feature a cast of five actors, including Aljin Abella, Emily Havea and Eva Seymour, playing all the roles, including multiple versions of Assange who will sometimes appear on stage simultaneously.
“I’m so happy that at this point in my life I get to write a play that is overtly political,” Cornelius said. “[Assange] is one of ours: whether you like him or not, he’s Australian, and that does connect us to him.
“It’s worth finding out [more about his story]. It’s worth our arts going there and having some clout.”
Truth headlines a Malthouse season focused on “fantastic and fantasy worlds that audiences can escape into”, according to Lutton, who will direct Tom Wright’s new play Troy and a one-woman adaptation of The Birds starring Paula Arundell.
For the latter, audience members will listen to a binaural sound design through headphones while Arundell narrates and embodies various characters on stage. “When the birds are attacking, it will sound like they’re pecking at your ear, and so I’m hoping it will be quite adrenaline-fuelling for the audience,” Lutton said.
The program also includes Meow Meow’s cabaret take on Hans Christian Andersen’s macabre fairytale The Red Shoes; the Australian premiere of ECHO: Every Cold-Hearted Oxygen, a hybrid theatre and live video work by the Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour (White Rabbit, Red Rabbit); the world premiere of The Orchard, a radical reimagining of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard by the Melbourne collective Pony Cam (Burnout Paradise); and a revamped version of A Nightime Travesty, an “an epic First Nations vaudevillian musical nightmare” created by A Daylight Connection (Kamarra Bell-Wykes and Carly Sheppard), which was a hit at the 2023 Yirramboi festival.
