I’m going to keep the exact nature of that scenic surprise as classified information though the issue of what can be kept “secret” in this online age goes to the heart of the evening’s concerns. It’s public knowledge that the production, designed by Miriam Buether, encountered technical difficulties in the preview stage.  The whole creative team (and let’s hear it for the back-stage crew too) pull together to leave us with a searing final image of what Bartlett contends Snowden’s existential situation (and our own, in the light of his trust-shattering revelations) to be: man in a state of chronic limbo and uncertainty. But the piece stands or falls by the dialogue and interactions that precede the denouement, and for much of the first 30 minutes or so, it definitely wobbles.  A dead-ringer for Snowden, with his boyish, pale looks and sleepy eyes, Jack Farthing’s “Andrew” gets visited in his Moscow hotel-room by a woman who might be the awaited representative of a WikiLeaks-style organisation. She calls herself Prism – the name of the vast surveillance programme Snowden exposed, but Bartlett also crowbars in a reference to Miss Prism, the governess in The Importance of Being Earnest. The title, Wild, is a nod to Oscar Wilde; the play adopts a mode of light comedy in place of overt suspense. It’s a strange, rather strained way of proceeding and the actress playing this flirty enigma (Caoilfhionn Dunne), required to tease, critique and mock-soothe her host, gabbles her lines as if unsure how much menace to inject them with. Director James Macdonald needs to take another look at the pace of that first section.
In June 2013, Edward Snowden became a global cause célèbre after lifting the lid on the mass surveillance programmes of US intelligence organisations.