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

Product Information

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.” 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. But the strength of Thorne’s play is its balance. His Reith, mesmerically played by Stephen Campbell-Moore, is no hero of the people; he’s a tortured man, consumed by his desire to do good, yet he concedes ground to Hayden Gwynne’s bullish Baldwin at every turn, refusing to let Labour leaders broadcast, and ultimately turning down the opportunity to air the Archbishop of Canterbury’s plea for compromise. On TV, she has appeared in Drop the Dead Donkey (BAFTA nomination), The Crown (Netflix) and Channel 4’s The Windsors, playing Camilla. A fascinating segment of history... the play creates a shimmering sense of the past... Thorne triumphantly uses real history to create a compelling drama that is both amusing, touching and revealing' WhatsOnStage

There are laughs too, mostly provided by the variety acts that populated the Beeb in between news segments: Haydn Gwynne's singer's assertion that you shouldn't be "cruel to a vegetab(uel)" made me laugh, though the biggest laugh belonged to the versatile Luke Newberry, whose skit, about the lies he would tell his Mum to prevent her discovering he was an actor, was laugh-out-loud hilarious! 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. Stephen Campbell Moore as John Reith and Adrian Scarborough as Churchill in When Winston Went to War With the Wireless at the Donmar. Photograph: Manuel HarlanFascinating as this roiling moment of history is, Thorne thumps home the modern-day parallels in rather too heavy-handed a fashion. We really do understand all the echoes and compromises of our contemporary media landscape (in a fascinating programme essay, Andrew Marr compares the current situation between the government and the BBC to an “abusive relationship”) and would be happy to let 1926 sit undisturbed in its own time period. There’s also an interesting if incongruous sub-plot about Reith’s conflicted personal life that is begging to be allowed the breathing space of an entire drama of its own.

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. Directed by Katy Rudd (Ocean at the End of the Lane, Eureka Day) and based on a true story, the play is a gripping and timely examination of the BBC’s independence during the 1926 General Strike.The play stars Stephen Campbell Moore (The History Boys, The War of the Worlds) as John Reith, Adrian Scarborough (The Chelsea Detective, Leopoldstadt) as Winston Churchill, and Haydn Gwynne (The Windsors, The Great British Bake Off Musical). What he means by that last comment is that the BBC was in its infancy. It was a tiny startup, staffed by a group of young war veterans, misfits, impresarios, intellectuals and engineers. But Reith, a visionary with immense ambition – matched by Churchill’s immense personal ambition – understood that broadcasting could be a great democratic power. “Most of the good things of this world are badly distributed and most people have to go without them,” he wrote. “Wireless … may be shared by all alike … the wealthy and the poor listen simultaneously … there is no first and third class.” The acting is fabulous across the board, but what really elevates the production is the complex writing of the character of the BBC's John Reith, and the concomitant contrary complexity of Stephen Campbell Moore's astonishing portrait of him: grandiose, tortured, idealistic, compromised, repressed, barely concealing an ever exploding fountain of emotions! 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]