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 , 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 ’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 , 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 made by two Swedish women in 2010, which Assange denied.
No charges.
