Since 2009 the National Theatre’s programme of transmitting performances for live screening in cinemas nationwide has proven increasingly popular. It is only fitting that the next NT Live event, on February 9, will involve Nicholas Wright’s new play about the early days of motion pictures. One of the points the play makes is that whatever the medium, it is the story and the audience connection that matter.
    
In 1936, Hollywood mogul Maurice Montgomery looks back on his beginnings nearly 40 years earlier in the unspecified “old country” as Motl Mendl. Returning to the shtetl where his photographer uncle had recently died, Motl discovers a Lumière Brothers Cinématographe (a camera-cum-projector apparatus) and falls under the spell of the travelling lights. Financed by local timber-merchant Jacob, Motl begins shooting, only to find an endless stream of problems both technical and personnel-related. Wright fantasises amusingly about these folk inventing the concepts of montage, continuity and even test screenings long before the first movie outfits had moved to Hollywood. The juxtaposition of now-familiar standard movie ideas in an unfamiliar setting is not unlike that in Terry Pratchett’s novel Moving Pictures, although the shtetl location here also emphasises the extent to which the pioneers of Hollywood were Jewish.
    
Motl finds his producer Jacob is an unremitting backseat director, dictating everything from the choice of star (someone whom, naturally, he wants to bed and whom, just as naturally, Motl just has and must keep their relationship secret) to the dressing-table used on set. Antony Sher has been increasingly exploring his Jewish heritage for some years, but it is difficult to conceive where he might next find a role more Jewish than Jacob… the prophet Isaiah, perhaps. Lauren O’Neil is highly plausible as Anna, the apex of the love triangle: Motl first falls in love with her through the camera lens, and in the projected sequences we see that the camera does indeed love her, with a hint of Lillian Gish about her. The awkward narrator-and-flashback structure comes into focus in the second half, when Damien Molony begins to double as both young Motl and Nate, an actor being auditioned by Montgomery. This, too, is when the interpersonal side of the story gains the ascendant: as Montgomery remarks of the characteristically Jewish-sentimental payoff, “It’s absurdly schmaltzy… but I’ll buy it.”

Written for the Financial Times.