Jack Thorne, author of The Motive and The Cue, now playing at the National Theatre, describes his new play as a love letter to the BBC.
The BBC’s mission is to inform, educate and entertain everybody, across all classes, whilst maintaining its independence, impartiality and truthfulness.
It’s May 1926. There’s a General Strike. The whole nation is at a standstill. In this time of gross crisis, the BBC and the government are at loggerheads as to who should be in control of the news.
The leading character in the play is not, as you might expect from the title, Winston Churchill, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, but John Reith, the founder and later the first director general of the BBC, who stopped the BBC from becoming Churchill’s mouthpiece during the Strike.
In the printed programme there is a photograph of John Reith, forty years on, looking like the arrogant, puritanical, bad-tempered monster, many people thought him to be.
Stephen Campbell Moore’s Reith comes across as a nice bloke and not in the least intimidating. Adrian Scarborough’s Churchill is all bluster. They have some good scenes together and separately.
There are also engaging confrontations between Reith and the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin (Hadyn Gwynne unexpectedly cast); between Reith and the Archbishop of Canterbury (Ravin J Ganatra), sympathetic to the miners; and between Reith and Charlie Bowser (Luke Newberry), the much younger man he loved.
Katy Rudd’s busy and fast-moving production emphasises we are in a world of radio and sound effects. The political situation and its pressures are punctuated with humorous excerpts from the BBC’s varied daily schedule.
Jack Thorne’s script could be the basis for a good television play.
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