Tangled web | 30 June 2016

Mike Bartlett’s curious blank-verse drama Charles III became an international hit. His new effort examines the cut-throat world of dark-web espionage. An American traitor named Andrew (Edward Snowden presumably) is hiding out in a Moscow hotel. Enter a flirty, giggling Irishwoman played by Caoilfhionn Dunne, who claims to be British and who teases Andrew over his betrayal of his homeland’s secrets. She evinces an interest in Oscar Wilde and the pair lock horns over footling minutiae. Andrew points out that Barbie dolls are called Sindy in the UK and this seems to demonstrate his familiarity with Britain. But he fails to spot the false cadences of her accent and he doesn’t query her use of the strange term ‘British Metropolitan Police’. And the name ‘Nick Leeson’ means nothing to him.

Their aimless and inconsistent conversation is mystifying. Are the errors intended as clues to a brilliant cat-and-mouse game or are they just the blunders of a scribbler past his deadline? The Irishwoman hints at a crush on Andrew but her invitations are aggressively farcical. ‘A boyfriend?’ she guffaws. ‘No, I have a relationship with a horse.’ She also claims to be negotiating on behalf of an unnamed figure hiding away in a London embassy (Assange presumably), but she doesn’t explain how a fugitive seeking sanctuary in Britain might influence the fate of an American refugee in Moscow. Just as baffling is the choice of the Russian authorities to hand this valuable defector over to an Irish conwoman rather than parading him in triumph before the world’s press. The writer has clearly realised that his garbled back story requires some justification and his remedy is to make Andrew profoundly dim. ‘I think you’re a little bit stupid,’ as the Irishwoman puts it. This useful improbability is a licence to send the dialogue wandering up a multitude of blind alleys.