Good news! The National ’s got a hit
Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston is as mad as hell with TV networks — and his show is electrifying
SIMPLY for theatrical spectacle, you are unlikely to find a show to match Network at the Royal National. Director Ivo van Hove throws every trick to keep the eye entertained.
There are TV screens, live outdoor action, an onstage restaurant for the public, a shocking moment of violence and more — all brilliantly stagemanaged by the insistently fashion-conscious Van Hove.
After so much plod and stodge at the National under Rufus Norris, this production is thrillingly watchable. Though I have one or two reservations, let’s celebrate its sheer panache.
Howard Beale is a struggling U.S. TV anchor, a poor man’s Walter Cronkite. Told his career is over, he throws an on- air wobbly, ranting at the awfulness of the news world. The viewers are so gripped, Beale’s job is saved and he becomes a national celebrity as the man who told Americans: ‘I want you to get mad’. Soon thousands are shouting out of their windows: ‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take this any more.’ Or as we said last year, vote Brexit. And the Americans said, vote Trump.
The Lyttelton stage has been divided: one side is a TV news studio with a glass box for the producers; the other side has cabaret- style seating where some audience members are fed and given drinks.
How they concentrate on the show, I don’t know.
On- stage cameras relay the action to a big back screen (with distractingly out-of-synch sound/lip movements). The film footage takes us a move away from the story’s characters. Mr van Hove specialises in this multi-layered yet slightly shallow reality. Here, he is on top form.
Bryan Cranston, from TV’s Breaking Bad, is superb as the craggy, deranged Beale. He is a ringer for City PR man Roland Rudd, who was in the first-night audience. Now there’s a massager of the news!
And it is one of the play’s messages — that mainstream news may be flawed. It also argues for the importance of ‘the complexity of people’. Yet we do not get to peer much inside Beale’s soul. Nor are many other characters explored to the full.
THE
TV executives around Beale engage in corporate politics, but apart from a broken marriage sub-plot, it is all rather metallic. And network TV types, in my experience, tend to be a great deal more snooty.
The sort who are depicted here may fit the old stereotype, but today’s broadcast execs are often infuriatingly pious and preachy.
Michelle Dockery is well cast as icy Diana, a hard-bitten producer who sees Beale’s madness could be saleable. Consider The Jeremy Kyle Show in Britain today and this story, originally a 1976 film, seems visionary.
In other respects, the years have not been kind to the plot (which is here adapted arrestingly by Lee Hall). The film passed sharp comment on the power of network television, but that has now been surpassed by the internet. And in time, inevitably, social media and Facebook and Twitter and their ilk will be surpassed by other news providers.
Nonetheless, I’m all in favour of people ‘ getting mad’. It was fun to watch the establishment audience at the National quivering at the fiery polemic from Beale. The one nagging worry I have is that for all the presentational brio from director Van Hove, this production may itself be hyping a story simply for ratings purposes.
PROLIFIC James Graham has opened another play, this time about Charles Ingram, the ‘coughing Major’ found guilty of cheating on ITV’s Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?
Mr Graham, whose past subjects have included Parliament and Seventies Fleet Street, turns his hand to popular culture and the Law.
Chichester’s Minerva Theatre has been turned into the set of ‘Millionaire’ with Keir Charles doing a jokey (vocally quite accurate) impersonation of quizmaster Chris Tarrant. Beside him sits Gavin Spokes as a
too- chubby Ingram. Did Ingram’s wife Diana (Stephanie Street) and her acquaintance Tecwen Whittock (Mark Meadows) prompt Ingram by coughing when he considered the multiple- choice answers that won him his million pounds?
The TV company produced a tape that certainly seemed to suggest it. After hearing that evidence, the Chichester theatre crowd pressed electronic buttons to pass an 83 per cent ‘guilty’ verdict on Tuesday.
An hour later, after the case for the defence, the audience thought by 59 per cent that Ingram should have been acquitted. Was this a bad miscarriage of justice? So it might seem. Yet Daniel Evans’s production aims for japes, accents caricatured, cameos hurried, the staging gimmicky. There is a sequence when the public keep coughing at the Ingrams in the street. Audience members are invited to answer pub quiz questions. The Law frolics and a senior Army officer sings Gilbert and Sullivan, ha-ha.
In some respects, it is little more than happened in life — the case was infected by media titillation and courtroom silliness. But I would have enjoyed greater dramatic anger.
Should the lawyers not be speared? Could the TV executives not be satirised more savagely? Some involved rose high in our public life — one prosecutor is now a judge and the top TV guy became a BBC trustee.
Come on, Mr Graham. We know you can do souffle appetisers. Let’s now have some meat. Some reviews appeared in earlier editions.