Last November I suggested that Nicholas Hytner had gone mad. Now he confirms the diagnosis with a new satire by Nicholas Wright, Travelling Light, which is the most embarrassing and mindless blunder I’ve ever seen on a subsidised stage. Hytner’s November crime was to mount a retro sitcom about Stalin’s terror. Now he baits the Russians again with a sketch-show set among the Tsarist peasantry.
Wright’s play, which Hytner directs, asks what might have happened if a crew of Jewish bumpkins had made a movie in 1900 using an early hand-cranked camera. We meet Motl Mendl, a jabbering numbskull armed with some film gear. He shoots five minutes of dreary footage in his shtetl and exhibits the results to his neighbours. They savage the film with glee and then, by magic, they collectively brainstorm a gripping weepie about a knocked-up skivvy and the baby she abandons in an orphanage. A rich timber-merchant, Jacob, suggests some tweaks to the storyline and offers to fund the film on condition that his grasping son-in-law Itzak acts as budget manager.
Hey presto. A trio of bickering Hollywood muppets is born: Motl the megalomaniac director, Jacob the interfering producer and Itzak the miserly bean counter who says no to every fresh expense. The shoot is a nightmare of colliding egos and midway through Motl has a lightbulb moment. If he emigrated to America he could make films without interference from on high. ‘Creatively I’d be free.’ Enjoy that lonely gag. It’s the pivot on which the whole evening rests. And if you’re planning to go, set your alarm. It comes after four or five hours.
The tone throughout is frivolous, skimpy, unfelt, unmeant, full of overblown gestures and hollow cackles. Even as film history the script is nonsense. An interior scene couldn’t possibly be lit by a few stained mirrors reflecting daylight through a window. And it’s unclear why a fiddler is hired to add a soundtrack to a silent film. Is ‘silent’ a particularly baffling concept at the National? Does anyone there speak English? The acting matches the script’s perfunctory witlessness.
Antony Sher plays Jacob as Borat. That’s all. He’s Borat with a beard. A reductive, empty, copycat effort. Motl, played by Damien Molony, has been encouraged to perform with frenetic exaggeration, all flinging arms, hoiked eyebrows and arch smirks. He’s like a jobless thesp overdoing an audition for kids TV by reciting his lines while signing them for the deaf and demonstrating how to turn a cornflake box into Postman Pat’s van. That said, Motl and Jacob are the outstanding personalities here. The rest are just a gang of bickering clowns. Quite what inspired this parochial burst of kulak-bashing nincompoopery I can’t say. The National, we’re often told, needs fans and I’ll happily bring mine along to ventilate the fires that deserve to engulf this folly. Really, if Hytner goes on like this, the best plan is just to torch the place.
At the Royal Court an experimental play by a newish playwright Nick Payne. It’s like Love Story. She’s Marianne, a particle physicist. He’s Roland, a struggling beekeeper. They meet at a barbecue. Marianne explains that quark theory obliges us to believe there are multiple universes in which choices we avoid coexist simultaneously with choices we make. Script reflects theory. Scenes are repeated several times with small differences, then with large differences, then with entirely different endings. The jumpy effect is clever-clever but full of high-calibre wit. Rafe Spall is great as the lugubriously loyal Roland (although sometimes he’s the faithlessly philandering Roland, too). The sexy Sally Hawkins offers fine support. She’s the goofy brunette who played the dim girl in Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky. She looks like SamCam on benefits.
This jumpy postmodern romance comes a cropper when Marianne gets a brain tumour. It’s terminal. She’s dying. But in the next scene, it’s benign. She’ll live. The scene after, she has no tumour at all. After finishing with Roland, she finds happiness with someone else. Here the play expires of its own fickle logic. No viewer can pledge their emotions to such an unreliable contract. Or so I thought. But the sell-out crowd, composed chiefly of drama students and their carers on day release, chortled and cheered at every turn. Nick Payne is talented and clever and he faces a dilemma here. To continue appealing to the trade with smart-alec whimsy or to write a mainstream play that honours the conventional longings of the human heart? Playwrights need the same advice as politicians. Don’t appeal to your core. They’re yours anyway. Reach out to the apathetic lumpen bourgeoisie. Aim for the don’t-knows because they know everything. They may be harder to please but if you can find their fun-buttons they have the power to reward you infinitely.
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