Theatre: Network
Lyttelton, National Theatre, London SE1 (020-7452 3000). Until 24 March 2018 Running time: 2hrs ★★★
I’m not usually keen on film adaptations, said Michael Billington in The Guardian, but this stage version of Paddy Chayefsky’s 1976 movie – in which a news anchorman cracks up on air, starts ranting about the evils of the corporate world and is heralded as a prophet of the airwaves – is an “almost total triumph”. The National’s normally inflexible Lyttelton stage has been transformed by Ivo van Hove and his designer, Jan Versweyveld, into an “extraordinary blend of television studio and public restaurant” (at the side of the stage real meals are served to punters – who thereby recreate the distracted audience watching the nightly news show). And vast video screens and multiple cameras give us close-ups of the actors, said Ian Shuttleworth in the FT. This is the most “triumphant demonstration” I’ve yet seen of this brilliant director’s “concepts of space, multimedia and audience/performance relationships”.
“Flesh and gizmo. Substance and reflections. Watchers and watched. A massive whirling mix of the mechanical and the human.” Van Hove’s “electric” staging of Network has restored at a stroke my “faltering esteem” for the Belgian auteur, said Susannah Clapp in The Observer. And Lee Hall – the screenwriter for Billy Elliot – has turned the film’s screenplay into a “prescient, urgent text” for our age of fake news and reality TV. Add to that a sensational performance from Bryan Cranston (of Breaking Bad) as the newsman, Beale – veering from “sincere to sceptical, palely haunted to passionately possessed” – and the whole thing seems infused with a sort of “messianic zeal”. On press night, “the audience at the National, not instinctive risers, were up on their feet as if at a revivalist meeting”.
Well, to echo Beale’s famous slogan that turned millions of viewers into angry acolytes, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more,” said Ann Treneman in The Times. That’s how I feel about this far “too tricksy” show. I loved the actors: Cranston is “brilliant”, as is Douglas Henshall as Beale’s boss, and Michelle Dockery “has her moments” as the TV executive from hell. But the “attention deficit” set design? “Grrrr.”