What’s it like being Julian Assange? These actors are finding out

Patricia Cornelius has been making theatre since the 1980s, but there are plenty of reasons why she’s nervous about her latest work. Truth is, she says, “the hardest thing I’ve ever done”. It is essentially the story of Julian Assange, but told in such a way that five actors might be delivering his lines, some of them in unison, at any one time.

There’s also the unnerving prospect that the man himself might turn up to see what this Malthouse production has made of his story. A mutual friend has made the WikiLeaks founder aware of the play, and though he has been keeping himself at a distance, Cornelius is alive to the possibility that he might be among the audience one night.

“I hope he comes,” she says. “It’d be hard. Imagine watching a play about you. I might have to make a run for it.”

Cornelius is one of Australia’s most lauded playwrights, with accolades including several Premier’s Literary Awards, Patrick White and Wal Cherry Awards, and a Green Room Lifetime Achievement Award. So you have to sit up and take notice when she describes Truth as her biggest challenge yet.

From left, Tomas Kantor, Susie Dee (seated), Emily Havea and Patricia Cornelius during rehearsals for Truth.Credit: Wayne Taylor

“Stylistically I wasn’t interested in doing a naturalistic play, and in fact I’m shit at naturalism. I was thinking: how do I engage with all this material and make it lively and not full of great big fat monologues?”

The answer she found was to avoid trying to represent Assange literally. Instead, the five actors will create a kind of chorus.

“It’s a technique to absolutely assert from the word go that this is not a doco-style drama. It’s quite abstracted at times, it’s stylistic and heightened, so you’re not expecting the usual. There’s a playfulness in the language that I couldn’t bear not to have,” she says.

The script is so playful, in fact, that it doesn’t actually allocate its dialogue to particular actors. Instead, who says what is being decided in the rehearsal room.

Cornelius’ long-time collaborator, director Susie Dee, agrees it’s a tough process. “It’s so much fun but it’s a challenge as well. You go ‘there could be four voices in unison here’. Then go, no, let’s have a lone voice here and let’s have a little space after that,” she says.

Emily Havea and Tomas Kantor are two of the actors tackling this task. “None of us have been cast because of our resemblance to Julian Assange,” Havea says, laughing. “We’re not going in to do the reality of his life. It’s about truth and how truth is silenced holistically. By splitting Julian up into all five of us it gives a sense that anyone could be Julian.”

“It’s not like we’re getting up there and going oh, I need to have Julian’s mannerisms down,” says Kantor. “We’re steering away from accents, we’re steering away from remaking a person. There are moments where there are a few of us as Julian at the same time. There are moments where it’s one of us. That was part of the theatricalising process. How can we have Julian grappling with these thoughts in conversation with himself?”

Cornelius and Dee initially tried to create a story that would echo Assange’s but feature invented characters. It just didn’t pass muster. Assange’s story is so original that Cornelius couldn’t resist addressing it head-on.

“I think that there’s a weird old-fashioned tendency to really distrust people that think differently,” she says. “He’s one of those types, and he’s actually quite courageous. Whether you like him or not, it’s about what he does. He unnerves a lot of people and they’re irritated by him because he doesn’t let things go. He’s tenacious and people don’t like it.”

The media coverage of Assange has frequently been polarising, but Truth isn’t interested in cartoon heroes and villains. “We’re not painting him as a perfect person,” says Kantor. “It doesn’t avoid some of the more controversial moments in his story. It goes there. Through this device of multiple Julians we have this ability to interrogate those things.”

Julian Assange on his return to Australia in June last year. “He unnerves a lot of people,” says Patricia Cornelius.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

The unconventional script requires a lot of work from all involved. It sometimes sounds more like a band creating a song – the melody is there, but it’s up for grabs which instrument plays what part.

“It’s one of those plays where it’s hard to learn because you’ve got seven pages of choral work that you kind of just need to learn together,” says Havea.

“You need to know all the lines and know them in their place to see when it would work to double the voices or triple the voices,” says Kantor.

And, says Dee, “it’s not just all about Julian”. Whistleblowers Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning also appear. “A big theme is silencing, surveillance, so it looks at whistleblowers, journalists,” she says.

Cornelius and Dee have been collaborating for more than 40 years. The first work they made together in the 1980s, the two-hander Lily and May, saw them touring the country and eventually took them to Edinburgh, London and the US. There’s likely no director more capable of handling the stylistic challenges of this work.

It’s not the first time Cornelius has addressed real-world issues, either: in 2013, Savages brought to mind the horrific death of Dianne Brimble on a cruise liner in 2002, while 2007’s The Call evoked the misadventures of David Hicks. But those dramas cocooned their inspiration in rich layers of lyricism, imagination and abstraction.

Centring her work on real people this time around presented a new difficulty to the seasoned playwright. “To actually write about living people, you have a huge responsibility when doing that. You don’t have the liberty of putting too many words in their mouths, or if you do that you have to stay true to them, rather than having your own agenda.”

Then there’s the fact that a made-up character can’t sue. A legal professional was brought in to comb over the script and ensure that nothing would end up in court. “It’s nerve-wracking,” says Cornelius. “The lawyer brought up copyright and libel stuff, but it was really helpful. I’m not going to lose my house.”

With the play’s subject now back in the country, how would its actors react if they noticed a familiar flash of white hair in the audience?

“We’ve spent three months getting in this guy’s brain and for him to show up would be amazing,” says Havea.

“I’m pretty proud of this world we’re creating and it’s very raw and honest,” says Kantor. “I think he’d have a good time with it.”

Truth is at Malthouse Theatre from February 13.