The Radicalisation of Bradley Manning

Can you imagine how Bradley Manning felt as he unleashed hundreds of thousands of classified military reports on a world that barely knew of their existence? There's a moment in The Radicalisation of Bradley Manning where we're given a clue. It's an extraordinary, euphoric release, and it's one of the few moments of light in this aggressively bleak production from the National Theatre of Wales. The euphoria doesn't last long, as the military establishment reassert their hold on the scruff of his neck. "Detainee 433453 are you OK?" they ask incessantly and maddeningly, as he shivers naked in a military prison. This really isn't nice at all.

Starting with an unsettling journey through a primary school just to reach the stage, Tim Price's play paints a vivid portrait of authority out of control, and of Manning's destructive relationship with it. Told through fragments of Manning's schooling, his relationship with his parents, and his doomed military career, two forces thrash it out: Manning's own drive to "do something with his life", and the bullying instincts of those who should help him do that. The fragments are delivered immersively, and affectingly. 

This isn't a perfect production. At times, one longs for a positive authority figure to balance the borderline cartoonish repulsiveness of those in power. And parallels between a Pembrokeshire schooling learning about Welsh martyrs and his later anti-authoritarian exploits feel overstated and laboured. But it's not the subtleties which make or break this production. What hits hardest is the visceral and tangible breaking of a man by a system with no moral authority to do so.