I'm in London, and have been doing and seeing some very exciting theatrical work. Unfortunately my extremely busy work schedule has left me little time to write about some of the theatre I've seen - Jez Butterworth's The Ferryman, Vicky Featherstone's bleak and beautiful production of Bad Roads at the Royal Court, Ann Washburn's very knowing, tongue-in-cheek adaptation of The Twilight Zone at the Almeida - but I did get the opportunity to see Ivo van Hove's much hyped, sold out production of Network at the National Theatre last night, and thought that it raised some fascinating theatrical and sociocultural questions. Whilst not flawless, as much of the hype would suggest, this was a slick and assured production that spoke powerfully to both its source material, and the current media climate.
The text itself is a stage adaptation of Paddy Chayefsky's 1976 film of the same name, a critically lauded satire starring Peter Finch, that looked at the complex and often dubious ethics of television in the era following the Watergate scandal. News anchor Howard Beale loses his job, owing to poor ratings, but when his mental health begins to unravel onscreen in his final broadcasts, he becomes a ratings sensation and is exploited by his struggling network in their ruthless pursuit of viewers and market share. Lee Hall's playtext positions itself in the era of the film, whilst also engaging aesthetically and ideologically in the present day. The faithful adaptation of the film means that certain elements of the story are dated - Michelle Dockery's strong performance deserved a more complex and nuanced lead female role. Our expectations of female roles have changed since the late 70s, and for me the brutal career woman who is incapable of feeling love and screws craggy older men over dinner was somewhat one-dimensional. The story is overwhelmingly masculine, and most of the female characters aren't given a great deal to work with.
The strongest aesthetic and ideological strain of this work was its focus on mediation. The show used live film relay, and screens all over the set (including a huge wrap-around that dominated the space above the stage) played footage from other parts of the stage, news broadcast headers, advertisements, newsreel - a lot of what the audience looked at during the performance was mediated through a screen. Philosophically, the play tries to establish the difference between the messy truth of human-to-human contact, and the manipulated, constructed, mediated 'truth' of television, and more specifically of the news. In a clever, and perhaps unintentional, metatheatrical turn, at the beginning of the show these screens were further mediated through other, smaller screens, as audience members sitting in the onstage restaurant took selfies, and even asked actors to take pictures for them. The strongest impression left at the end of the play was of a world (our world) entirely mediated through screens, cut and edited and collated in a way that often doesn't resemble its actuality.
Further to this, the narrative arc of the play moves from the integrity of Howard Beale as a traditional newscaster, to the bastardisation of the news as polarising, opinion-driven entertainment, drawing terrifyingly relevant parallels to the aesthetic and culture of Fox News specifically, and cable news generally, in the US. The corporate reshuffles that appear throughout the play, where the news division of fictional network UBS is to be subsumed into its entertainment and programming division, reflects a constant hunger for drama, partisanship, and entertainment, and a general societal inability to focus on detached rationality. At times, this narrative arc was able to astutely illustrate the beginnings of our current media culture, and our insatiable need for opinion driven entertainment, passing as news. Van Hove's direction was able to maintain an awareness of the significance of this narrative arc and its terrifying relevance to a contemporary audience, without allowing the material to become preachy, or to overstate its importance.
At the centre of the show was Brian Cranston, giving a charismatic and compelling performance as Howard Beale. Cranston moved between assuredness, anger, and madness, and perhaps found his strongest moments in states of prophetic grace, such as the monologue where he stepped off the stage and squeezed past audience members, eventually sitting on the armrest between two people, still speaking congenially, while he (and us - I was seated just behind him at that point) appeared on the screen onstage. His repeated delivery of the immortal line - "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore" - modulated beautifully from anger, to distress, to the banality of a catchphrase. It's a magnetic performance, and it anchors a show that has a staggering number of people on the stage - patrons in the restaurant, a veritable army of technicians, and a huge cast of television studio staff.
The mass of bodies onstage, situated within an all-encompassing screen and glass-lined cavern, gave the impression of a monolithic organism, almost a hive. This idea was especially well treated in the lead up to news broadcasts, where someone (usually Cranston) would be trailed and fussed over by makeup artists, assistants, other UBS employees, camera people, and technicians, an immense countdown would be ever diminishing on the wall, set pieces would be rearranged to create the studio, and then with a second to spare, giant lights would fly down from the ceiling and the broadcast would begin, in perfect calm and composure. This manifestation of the human and technical network behind the Network of the title was able to illustrate a salient point about the behaviour of the mob. 'Hive mind', both onstage and in the general public responding mindlessly to Howard Beale, prophet of the airwaves, was a central concern of this show, and beautifully realised.
The show is not without its flaws - alongside some dramaturgical issues with dated material, the pacing suffers in some of the slower, quieter sections, where the frenzy of the TV studio is gone and the enormous countdown projected on the wall isn't keeping everyone to time. There are sections where the minutiae of emotional shifts, which can be so beautifully and poignantly captured in live film productions, are lost in the cavernous design. For such a slick production, it also feels as though it could be slimmed down somewhat. The four DJ-like figures producing and mixing live sound above the stage are not given dramaturgical justification, and seem extemporaneous to the world of the play.
Further to this, a major feature of this production was the onstage restaurant, where audience members sat throughout the performance and ate a meal, drank champagne, and often found themselves caught in the back of camera shots as unsuspecting extras. A number of scenes within the play took place in a restaurant, and this concept cleverly allowed said restaurant to be full and functioning, and therefore have some degree of verisimilitude, but it seemed mainly to fill the stage further, creating more movement and action within the hive. I'm cynical about the restaurant's dramaturgical significance, beyond its novelty as a concept, however it did slyly illustrate a central ideological shift within the play. When the Howard Beale show becomes a no-holds-barred, live studio audience, catchphrase-laden free for all, an oft-repeated tagline is "Remember, the news is about YOU". In some way, the onstage restaurant transmuted that concept of individualistic exceptionalism into the structure of the play - remember, the play is about YOU.
Which leads me, as it so often does, to the audience. The audience in the auditorium were positioned in an intriguing way throughout this show - before the show began, actors were milling around the TV studio chatting and quite obviously waving to and talking about people in the audience. This kind of self-awareness that is so ingrained in the theatrical structure that it becomes un-theatrical, was fascinating, and positioned us very obviously as an audience. However over the course of the play this positioning shifted subtly and tellingly. We moved from being a theatrical audience to a TV studio audience, clapping on cue and yelling Beale's catchphrase "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore" over and over again, louder each time. Most intriguingly, we then became something more of a congregation, as Beale talked to us with the fervour and disposition of a prophet about a life dictated through the screen of "the tube", then as network boss Jensen preached from on high about a capitalism so all-encompassing and benign it becomes a kind of communism, and finally as Beale then took this message as his own, tanking ratings for his show and necessitating (within the perverse tragedy of the play) his murder by a terrorist within the audience. This transformation of the audience reflects our transforming relationship to screen-based technology - we started as conscious audience members, sat formally around the TV, then became involved in the structures and operations of the medium through studio audiences and reality television, and are finally morphing into congregants, gathering around the individual places of worship contained within our phone screens, heads bowed reverently.
This kind of dramaturgical nuance is the most significant takeaway from this show, which for all its noise, energy, seemingly exorbitant production costs, and staggering technical capacity, is readily supported by a relevant and complex dramaturgy. The terrifying resonances of this particular show, when (according to recent New York Times reports) the leader of the United States spends up to 8 hours a day watching cable news, cannot be overstated, and were driven home by a compilation of presidential oaths, from Nixon to Trump, played after the curtain call. This is an important and beautifully executed show, that illuminates, manifests, and challenges the moral and social quandaries of our mediated world.