The news events covered are from 1975,
but the tech, the look and above all the feel are unambiguously 2017.
Paddy Chayefsky’s screenplay (voted one of the ten best in the history
of cinema) was a coruscating satire on news, entertainment and civic
anger when it was filmed, and adapter Lee Hall has scarcely had to
change a word – just trim and re-point the action here and there – to
present it as a horrifying prophecy of the new normal. The story of
newscaster Howard Beale, who announces his on-air suicide then morphs
into a “prophet of the airwaves”, getting caught up in network and
financial politics, would hardly make us turn a hair if it were
reported in any of the media so skewered by the tale itself.
Director Ivo van Hove’s staging is the most triumphant demonstration I
have seen of his concepts of space, multimedia and audience/performance
relationships. Forget the ballyhoo about punters seated at dining
tables onstage and served real meals during the show; that’s literally
a sideshow. Van Hove and designer Jan Versweyfeld have fashioned a
multi-area, multi-video-screen, multi-camera playing environment which
conveys how events are mediated without alienating us from the live
action. At one point, Douglas Henshall and Michelle Dockery as a pair
of news executives – Henshall stolid as Beale’s old friend, Dockery
enthusiastic as she senses the coming trend – are seen onscreen walking
along the South Bank; the camera then appears to follow them onstage,
and if that first sequence is pre-recorded, it’s immensely well
integrated with live events. In a delicious touch, a row of four men
can be seen above the main screen, looking like a hairier version of
Kraftwerk; I had assumed that they were vision mixers, but they are in
fact the electronic band Blindman, and Kraftwerk numbers from the album
The Man Machine punctuate the
score.
In the central role of Beale, Bryan Cranston is everything you might
expect and hope. He eschews the mad messianics of Peter Finch in the
original film in favour of a measured yet passionate mission-to-inform
delivery, sometimes from the second row of the audience. We are used to
lapping Cranston up on screen, and van Hove’s compelling set-up here
gives us that familiar experience plus the added thrill of the man in
the flesh. Supporting attractions include a carnivorous Tunji Kasim and
an episcopal Richerd Cordery. Dockery is perhaps ill-served by a
character who goes all-out for ratings and sexual satisfaction alike
without seeing anything behind either, but makes the most of what she
is given as a prophet in her own way of reality TV. The only truly
dispiriting element is that Beale’s slogan, adopted by millions, of
viewers, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this any more!”, is
so unchallenging today that it would hardly gain a handful of retweets.
Written for the Financial
Times.