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

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The confrontational energy from both sides is matched with plenty of humour. Short scenes recreate some of the output of the time, from singers to musicians and comedians. Remarkably, much of it sounds like something you would still hear being broadcast on Radio 4 Extra in the present day. On TV, she has appeared in Drop the Dead Donkey (BAFTA nomination), The Crown (Netflix) and Channel 4’s The Windsors, playing Camilla. AUDIO-DESCRIBED PERFORMANCE – Saturday 8 July 2.30pm, touch tour at 1pm (audio described by VocalEyes) Fight the government and imperil the corporation? Or accept that in a crisis, the BBC should sacrifice its independence? The play’s title teases that Thorne, who wrote The Motive and the Cue and Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, is interested in the mano-a-mano encounter between Reith and Churchill. In fact, it’s more a character study in how Reith, the son of a Presbyterian minister, tried to balance his professional ambition with his conscience and sympathy for the strikers. Is he willing to sell his soul for the BBC’s future? Stephen Campbell Moore captures this fragile hauteur well; his Reith is a pine tree blown in a storm, buffeted by memories of his gay lover and duty to his neglected wife.

Akbar, Arifa (14 June 2023). "When Winston Went to War With the Wireless review – radio is the star of BBC crisis drama". The Guardian . Retrieved 1 August 2023.The Telegraph values your comments but kindly requests all posts are on topic, constructive and respectful. Please review our Yet something feels under-powered about this central conflict. There’s a lot of shouting – and Adrian Scarborough’s Churchill doesn’t help things. He gets a few nice laughs, but Churchill here is a caricature. There’s also an awful lot of history to crunch through: characters lob gobbets about Gallipoli and the Gold Standard at each other like hand grenades.

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. Akbar, Arifa (2023-06-14). "When Winston Went to War With the Wireless review – radio is the star of BBC crisis drama". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077 . Retrieved 2023-07-15.An unreliable history: When Winston Went to War with the Wireless, at the Donmar, reviewed | The Spectator This production contains strobe lighting, haze, the smoking of a vapour cigar, and the appearance and firing of a gun Adrian Scarborough will play Winston Churchill, with Stephen Campbell Moore as John Reith. Further casting will be announced at a later date. 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. 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.”

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. It felt quite amateurish especially the people wandering on and off stage screaming in the first act. There is also only so much fast walking around a stage I could take.

What's the story of When Winston Went To War With The Wireless?

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]

Apr 24, 2023 18:51:21 GMT londonpostie said:I just booked! You need to go deep into the run, though. I booked the last week. 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. 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. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month.

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A steel-coated document of the icy political waltz between the BBC and Winston Churchill... what is it to control truth and speak truth to power?' Broadway World The electricity Campbell Moore breathes into this complex man is the lifeblood that lifts this show above a simple conflict between a Government and an Institution. 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. 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.