Network (National Theatre)
Him off of Breaking Bad! In the flesh! Having a breakdown! OMG!
This is going to be a quick blog because TIME, but also because there isn’t really much to say.
Like Jubilee, Network is the stage version of a film I’d never heard of before. Also like Jubilee, the plot was kinda beside the point; what mattered is what the characters, and the aesthetics, say to our current political situation. Where the two shows differ is that while Jubilee was electric with fury, Network just purported to be. The famous line comes from the main guy, a news anchorman who has a meltdown on air: ‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore!’ When he comes a surprise ratings hit, he’s put back onto primetime and then the real meltdown comes; his mental health in freefall, the gross network execs try to maintain ratings by striking deals with terrorists and then, finally, taking out a hit on their fading star.
There is more to it than this, but there was a whole thing about a letter-writing campaign and an Arab takeover during which I got wholly lost. Part of me wonders if they were wilfully playing fast and lose with the plot to punch up the resonances with Fox News and all those right-wing cable news tyrants.
There are only really two things to really take home from it all. The first is that Bryan Cranston really is very good and I’m very pleased he’s done an adventurous subsidised stage thing rather than some smarmfest in the West End. The second is that Jan Versweyveld’s set is astonishing. It’s one of these live-filming jobbies that he and van Hove have perfected, as in Roman Tragedies. As it’s a TV studio though, none of that stuff feels like an affectation, and the whole look ends up being strangely and beautifully hyper-realistic. Just look at these pictures. I mean, don’t your pupils just dilate their way out of your entire face?
There you go, you’ve basically just seen all the best bits of Network. I’ve saved you £60. And you don’t have to watch an actress demonstrate that her character is ambitious by fucking a married TV executive in the most ridiculous, empty, pure cringe sitcom-y way I’ve ever seen. It looked like she was riding a fucking hobby horse, and even though I know it was meant to be funny, and not naturalistic, that doesn’t stop my skin from fucking crawling.
