The feud between Conservative politicians and our national broadcaster is almost as old as the BBC itself, as Jack Thorne’s wily new play reminds us. The face-off here between the service’s founder John Reith (Stephen Campbell Moore) and then-Chancellor Winston Churchill (Adrian Scarborough) over the reporting of the General Strike of 1926 has obvious contemporary parallels: sometimes too obvious.
But Thorne also fascinatingly explores deeper questions of personal morality and hubris within two deeply arrogant men. The script teems with detail. Katy Rudd’s production felt slightly undercooked on opening night, but nevertheless glows with affection for the idea and the ideals of early radio. The live performance of sound effects is a highlight, and the juxtaposition of dated music-hall frivolity and earnest debate (including Woman’s Hour and gardening programmes) echoes the Radio 4 schedules today.
The plot: four years after its founding the high-minded Reith has built the British Broadcasting Company (it became a corporation in 1927) into a national service to entertain, educate but also inform. It serves “first and third class as if they were equal” as he condescendingly puts it. When newspaper printers go on strike alongside dockers, transport staff and steelworkers in sympathy with locked-out miners, he finds himself in charge of the nation’s main remaining news resource.
Churchill, railing against Bolshevism but also self-interestedly keen to outflank PM Stanley Baldwin (Haydn Gwynne, in a lovely gender-blurred turn) launches his own paper, The British Gazette, promoting a biased government line. Can he persuade the religious but also hugely ambitious Reith to fall into step – especially when the Archbishop of Canterbury pens a statement sympathetic to the strikers? Churchill’s threats – the revoking of the BBC’s charter, the introduction of advertising – sound familiar.
Alongside acute sideswipes at police violence, the restriction of the right to strike or protest, and Tory infighting, Thorne has tremendous, debunking fun with his main characters. He suggests Churchill might have been more like his uber-fan Boris Johnson than is usually admitted. Scarborough plays the cigar-chewing, epithet-spouting politician as a fleshy, boozy narcissist, focused only on his own advancement.
Thorne seizes too on the likelihood that Reith – scarred hero of WWI and strident defender of traditional values – had a Philip Schofield-style relationship with his much younger “friend” Charles Bowser. Certainly, he kissed and admired Bowser, then married his wife Muriel three weeks after Bowser proposed to her, a dodgy move in anyone’s books. “Why is it important for you to be important?” Muriel subsequently, tellingly demands.
There’s a physical as well as a moral reconsideration of the two main protagonists here. Reith was autocratic and hugely tall, but Campbell Moore portrays him as small and haunted despite his messianic self-belief. Scarborough’s Churchill is petulant, particularly when reminded he crashed the economy by returning to the Gold Standard and caused 250,000 casualties in the Gallipoli campaign. Again, contemporary bells ring.
As well as turning Gwynne into a Theresa May-ish Baldwin, Thorne and Rudd redress some other historic imbalances. Reith’s lowly factotum Isabel (a poised Kitty Archer) becomes a manifestation of the BBC’s conscience. Shubham Saraf is excellent as Chief Engineer Peter Eckersley, holding out for truth.
At times the contemporary resonances feel strained or even careless: did anyone refer to a song as an “earworm” in 1926? But overall this is a fascinating reminder of how history repeats itself, usually as comedy.
Donmar Warehouse, to July 29, donmarwarehouse.com
