When Winston Went to War with the Wireless (NHB Modern Plays)

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The weakest strand of the piece is its suggestion that Reith’s conflicted sexuality and his love affair with a young man called Charlie (Luke Newberry) led to his uncertainty. But when Reith is in direct conflict with Adrian Scarborough’s suave, humorous yet furious and blustering Churchill, the play blazes into life, the strength of their arguments swinging from side to side. It’s a fascinating segment of history, when – as Thorne said in an interview – “everything could have happened in a different way” and his play creates a shimmering sense of the past as John Reith struggled to preserve the independence of his nascent British Broadcasting Company, then just four years old, by preventing it from being commandeered as a direct arm of government. Sound is married to visuals in arresting ways too on Laura Hopkins’ clever set and flashes of light (design by Howard Hudson with video projection by Andrzej Goulding) reveal the strike itself. It is this delight in and celebration of sound, so apt for a play about the power of radio, that makes the play worth seeing. Writing for Time Out, Andrzej Lukowski also awarded the play three stars of five, claiming that it "never quite manages to live up to its intriguing concept" and calling it "an entertaining but flawed exercise in cakeism." [4] Adrian Scarborough will play Winston Churchill, with Stephen Campbell Moore as John Reith. Further casting will be announced at a later date.

It started with impact, I loved the live foley on stage throughout and the performances were strong, but at multiple points I found my mind wandering and the play dragging. The first half stronger than the second, where all excitement seemed to be gone. The story comes in fast, evocative scenes with dialogue delivering lots of information, entertainingly, but not with enough probing. Unfortunately there are so many interesting things to talk about that Thorne seems to get distracted and never talks about any of them for long enough. With the printing presses shut down, the only sources of news are the government's British Gazette, edited by Chancellor of the Exchequer Winston Churchill, and the independent, fledgling British Broadcasting Company, led by John Reith. The stage is set for a fierce battle over control of the news and who gets to define the truth.He was recently formally diagnosed as autistic, after a doctor wrote to his agent suggesting as much, having heard him on Desert Island Discs. It has been hugely helpful, he says, and not just to give him an excuse to get out of going to the parties he had always inexplicably hated. “It’s helped a lot with my history,” he says. “It’s helped me put things in a box – scars – that I didn’t understand before.” Stuff from school? Yes, he says, and other things. “I don’t think I was happy until I was 32.” That was when he met his wife, Rachel. It received the most muted curtain call I've seen since pre-COVID, though this could in part be due to the average age of the audience being around 80+. I'm exaggerating, but I was definitely the youngest person there and I'm 38. Jun 13, 2023 7:27:03 GMT justinj said:It was ok. After seeing patriots last week, during which I was engrossed throughout, I was hoping for more of the same. Unfortunately I found my mind wandering during a lot of this.

The General Strike affected transport, travel and supplies over 12 days. The BBC was the only source of news, independent from both the government and the TUC. The picture of Churchill is not that of the heroic war time leader but someone bullying, determined that the Bolshevik revolution should not encompass Britain. What with Churchill’s anti-emancipation shown in Sylvia, pre-war Churchill is being reassessed. When Winston Went to War with the Wireless opens with a sharp, spectral tableaux of coal miners toiling. Soon, those miners are downing tools and the Trades Union Congress has called a general strike, paralysing Britain. The fledgling BBC, founded only three years before by John Reith, finds itself on the horns of a dilemma – should it report the objective truth of the strike, police brutality and all? Or should it dance with the devil (well, Stanley Baldwin’s Tories) and be used as a government mouthpiece to help quell a putative Bolshevik revolution? Haydn Gwynne (1957 – 2023) was an acclaimed British actress, known for both her stage and screen roles.The year is 1926 and the General Strike is on, with every union in the country striking in solidarity with the nation’s 1.2 million coal miners, who are having wage reductions forced upon them. That includes the print unions: all papers in the country have ceased publication, leaving a huge information gap to be filled – and exploited. Reith strikes a win by featuring trade union views but loses to the government’s edict not to air a conciliatory speech by the archbishop of Canterbury. The BBC’s future as a corporation stands in the balance if he does not bend to their will. Thorne adds: “I hope this whole play is a love letter to the BBC. I hope this whole play is a love letter to people in authority and how they find their way through these crises. Because I wouldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it.” If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month.

Campbell Moore's intimate and revealing performance is very special, like Gatiss's performance in "The Motive and the Cue," but Campbell Moore has more to work with, and the story is more relevant and more important to our lives today. Campbell Moore is at once buttoned up, cupping his words in a deliberate throat, while suggesting a stammering agitation at the forces restraining his grandiose ambitions: at one point, in private, he practically screams out his desire for greatness. Ultimately, I just didn't think the story was deep enough. It was interesting, and especially the parallels between the situation in this play and the modern-day relationship between the Tory party and the BBC, but I don't think it needed two hours to tell it. And of course there are plenty of juicy echoes with our current politics, as strikes disrupt the country, the BBC and government remain uneasy with each other, and a Churchill tribute act dominates our politics. But I’m not sure that makes this play illuminatingper se, it simply points out how little things have changed.Thorne really goes hard on exploring Reith’s tortured sexuality, and the stunningly messy love triangle between him, his former male lover Charlie (Luke Newberry) and Reith's wife Muriel (Mariam Haque), who Charlie had wanted to marry. But even if the endlessly watchable Campbell Moore is undoubtedly the main character, it’s not really a play about Reith, but rather the historical events he was caught up in –the raking over of his love life feels like it probably belongs in a different drama. Meanwhile, boozy, eccentric, baggage-laden Chancellor of the Exchequer Winston Churchill (Adrian Scarborough) has an alternative plan - the British Gazette , a state newspaper edited by… Winston Churchill.