Modern touches in outstanding production
IKNOW OF at least two colleagues who didn’t see Breaking Bad, the Netflix series that launched Bryan Cranston to stardom. So, for this stage version of the Paddy Chayefsky-written, Sydney Lumet-directed 1976 movie in which Peter Finch played middleaged TV news anchor Howard Beale who goes off the rails while on air, and in the process becomes a “latter day prophet”, they perhaps didn’t have my and every other Cranston fan’s sense of anticipation.
So to address fellow Breaking Bad veterans for a moment, in the flesh Cranston is everything you could hoped for. As Beale, the TV presenter who turns mid-life crisis into a rallying cry that every unfulfilled, under-valued human can join, he has that quality that made his Walter so compelling: the ability to reveal the simmering anger that lies deep within his genial everyman. In that sense Breaking Bad’s Walter (the undervalued teacherturned-drug dealer) and Howard (who is about to be sacked because of ratings) are not so far apart.
What Cranston can do more effectively than any actor I can think of is switch from homespun charm to deadpan menace as easily as drawing a curtain. And here, these qualities do much for Ivo van Hove’s astounding and soaring production. Without them, it might have lost its anchor in more ways than one.
In characteristic style, the director hasn’t let the 1970s setting prevent him from delivering an ultra-modern show. The Lyttleton stage, normally conspicuously big for most plays set indoors, has the right dimensions for the busy TV studio and newsroom in which most of the action is set. Jan Verswyveld’s design also has on-stage seating for some of the audience. The area doubles as a sizeable restaurant for the eatingout scenes. There’s even a kitchen downstage quietly serving up food.
Meanwhile, all the countdown tension of a live TV studio is stoked by gliding cameras, ticking digital clocks and wall-sized TV screens. You would have thought that adapter Lee Hall could have done more to modernise the career-woman cliché that is Diana Christensen (played by Faye Dunaway in the film) the hardball, amoral exploiter of Beale’s condition. But Michelle Dockery terrifically transmits the ruthless ambition of the role even if she also has to be the love interest of Douglas Henshall’s middle-aged married studio exec.
In these supposedly enlightened post-Weinstein days, could she not have been a he, and he a she? Also, the theme of human decency being sacrificed at the altar of money and rating is hardly revelatory. But with global corporations running rampant, terrorists on the loose and the sense of society breaking down it’s amazing how modern this work feels.
As for Cranston, I’d watch him in anything. But bring on his Lear.