4 ONLINE THEATRE Wild, Hampstead Theatre London – Morning Star Online

MIKE BARTLETT'S opening play in Hampstead Theatre's short season of free weekly online productions owes much to Pinter's comedies of menace, with their characteristic mixture of humour, mystery and lurking fear.

Like The Dumb Waiter, originally planned for Hampstead's main theatre programme now postponed Wild is set initially in a recognisable social context, with the plot progressively leaving the target character bewildered and unhinged.

Michael, played by Jack Farthing, is a somewhat naive Edward Snowden-type whistleblower who, having leaked a massive stash of incriminating Pentagon documents, is on the run.

He's trapped in a Moscow hotel room with Caioilfhionn Dunne's zany minder pressing him to join her unidentified resistance movement. In the background there is apparently an unnamed leader holed up in a nearby foreign embassy Julian Assange?

She progressively strips the nervous Michael of his wavering self-confidence: If you want to know anything about yourself, just ask.

When he fights back, insisting he had acted in the hope of creating a freer world and demanding to know what his tormentor believes in, she answers: Progress. Her evidence? Wi-fi.

She is replaced by an equally enigmatic protector with a more threatening approach, leading to a final surrealist climax which both mirrors the increasingly tragi-farcical nature of our contemporary world and, in James Macdonald's production, cleverly plays with and merges the very artifice of theatre and video.

Available online until April 5, hampsteadtheatre.com

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4 ONLINE THEATRE Wild, Hampstead Theatre London - Morning Star Online