Today, one day before his 24th birthday, Bradley Manning will start the process that will determine whether he'll celebrate his next 30 birthdays behind bars. I will be watching every minute of this case, because for the past year I have been writing a play entitled The Radicalisation of Bradley Manning for National Theatre Wales.

I have been following Bradley's case since his arrest in May 2010. His story had a heady mix of espionage, geo-politics and cyber-frontierism, but it wasn't until I learned of Bradley's teenage years in Wales that my curiosity turned into obsession.

This young soldier – who has attempted to call the president of the US as a defence witness – knows bus timetables around Haverfordwest. He knows the trials of schoolboy rugby, and speaks rudimentary Welsh. Once I realised this, Bradley became more than a news story.



We had things in common. So reading accounts of his torture in the Quantico Brig haunted me.
While his treatment shocked me, his alleged actions thrilled me. If Bradley is guilty of uploading the information to WikiLeaks then he has courageously reminded us that not only is finance, religion, media, manufacturing and politics transnational, but so is our morality.

At a meeting with NTW to discuss the production of another of my plays, I could not get the young soldier out of my head, and confessed to the theatre that I believed we were doing the wrong play. I had to write about Manning, I told them, and they had to produce it. (It wasn't as finger-snappy as that, of course – I did shoe-gaze and apologise a lot.) NTW agreed, and to my eternal gratitude we switched plays.

Read the rest of Tim's Blog on the Guardian website.