How is Ralph Fiennes, one of the best actors in the world, not getting offered better roles than Official Secrets?!

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a passable movie — as in, passable while you’re watching, but also no one’s missing much if they pass it by altogether. An interesting story, uninterestingly told, about an uber-interesting topic, explored intermittently. The styleless approach inhibits it from entering into a meaningful conversation with the army of themes at the disposal of anything about whistleblowing.

For a piece of art concerning the subject whose structure actually reflects, and thus interacts with, and thus deepens, ideas related to whistleblowing, New Yorkers can check out Is This a Room this fall courtesy of The Vineyard Theatre. I caught its initial run last year, and I’m looking forward to catching it again, because I’m still trying to catch up with it. The dialogue excerpts from a verbatim transcript of Reality Winner’s arrest, a stylistic oddity that, while hilarious in its own right (the cast!), also begs dramaturgical unpacking to shed light on what the play’s saying regarding our conception(s) of whistleblowing, and whistleblowers.

More to come when it opens next month…