There’s been a certain amount of myopia surrounding the most controversial productions covered in this issue.  Much pooh-poohing of Tim Crouch’s Adler & Gibb, quite wrongly in my opinion, and entirely missing one of the major aspects of its conception and staging.  Virtually everyone observes that it’s a piece about our relationship to art and its modes of (re)presentation, but nobody twigged that their own responses were an example of it.  Look at the number of reviews opining that the piece grew more comprehensible, more penetrable, as it went on.  What no-one says, even coincidentally never mind musing on a relationship with this, is that the staging likewise grew deliberately more naturalistic.  The less we were obviously required to work at “understanding” what was going on, the more willing we were to accept that we did  “understand” it.  Oh, but we don’t like being manipulated like that?  What nonsense, every play manipulates us to some degree or other in some way or other; what this reveals is that we’d rather we were lied to and told we weren’t being manipulated even as we were.


As for the more rarefied sniffs in the direction of Great Britain…  It was always going to be compared to the National Theatre’s last great satire on the press, David Hare and Howard Brenton’s Pravda, in the mid-1980s.  I was genuinely surprised, though, that so much of that comparison was snootily pseudo-qualitative.  Of course Richard Bean’s play was never going to be as elegant as Hare & Brenton’s; it wasn’t about as elegant a subject.  The Times in the 1980s, pre-Murdoch, was what Britain liked to imagine it was at that time; the News Of The World in the 2000s was what the country genuinely is these days, unsubtle hypocrisies and all.  Several reviewers quoted one of the play’s most memorable lines, “That’s what we do: go out and destroy other people’s lives”, but only one (ahem) spotted that this was a verbatim quotation from the actual news editor of the News Of The World during the phone-hacking events, Greg Miskiw.

As for the society being indicted by Great Britain and our ability to understand anything more complex or arcane…  A decade ago the Sunday Telegraph’s theatre critic was John Gross, whom more than one publication had called “the best-read man in Britain”.  Today that post is occupied by Tim Walker, who mistakes première dates and actors’ roles and takes up more space with mentions of himself than of any of his supposed subjects (his Great Britain review is almost unparalleled in its comparative modesty, with only five first-person references)… and he calls the play “slight”?  Ye gods.  Meanwhile in The Sunday Times, Christopher Hart affects to wonder whether it is “merely vindictiveness” to remark on Nicholas Hytner’s position on the executive board of the BBC?  Answer: no, not merely: it is also a columnist on a paper owned by Rupert Murdoch, the real subject of both Pravda and Great Britain, doing precisely what is required of him by alleging specious linkages in order to snipe at competition to or criticism of Murdoch interests and conduct.  Speaking personally, I frequently loathe Richard Bean; he can get up my nose like a little finger, so to speak.  It’s one of his greatest qualities, and it’s why he was absolutely the right person to write this play.
    
Written for Theatre Record.