Synopsis A brilliant man kills himself mid-career, leaving what 'it' is. Based on the remarkable life of the star BBC correspondent James Mossman during his last years, 1963 to 1971, The Reporter searches for the truth behind his bewildering suicide. What lies beneath the surface? Or is the surface ultimately all there is? World premiere. Supported by the Laura Pels Foundation
Ben Chaplin stars in the world premiere of Nicholas Wright’s The Reporter, which opened last night (21 February 2007, previews from 14 February), at the National’s Cottesloe Theatre (See News, 2 Nov 2006).
Based on the life of BBC correspondent James Mossman during his last years (1963-1971), the play searches for the truth behind his suicide. It’s directed by former NT artistic director Richard Eyre, who also directed Wright’s multi award-winning Vincent in Brixton at the National, in the West End and on Broadway. Chaplin is joined in the cast by Paul Ritter and Angela Thorne.
Overnight critics unanimously enjoyed Eyre’s fast-paced production and Wright’s witty script, as well as the performances of the supporting cast. However, while some thought Chaplin’s performance was top-notch, others were left feeling emotionally uninvolved.
Michael Coveney on Whatsonstage.com (4 stars) – “James Mossman, a brilliant foreign reporter and presenter… committed suicide in 1971, leaving a note in his Norfolk cottage: ‘I can’t bear it any longer, though I don’t know what ‘it’ is.’ Nicholas Wright’s new play, directed by former NT boss Richard Eyre, attempts to define what the ‘it’ was in the form of a wide-ranging investigation presented by the dead reporter himself. Although Mossman, charismatically played by Ben Chaplin, emerges as an interesting, conflicted character… there are no final answers to the question. That knotty ambiguity in the play is both its unusual strength and its slight weakness as theatre…. Chaplin looks nothing like (Mossman) yet catches him exactly, especially in his dryness, watchfulness and emotional integrity. Rob Howell’s design recreates the grey television studio where Robin Day (a brilliant impersonation by Paul Ritter)… has replaced the Churchillian gravitas of a sick Richard Dimbleby…. There are many… good jokes in an evening that may not pack a final punch but which clearly offers the best new play of the year so far.”
Michael Billington in the Guardian (3 stars) – “Anyone who remembers James Mossman as a star BBC reporter will be intrigued by Wright's exploration of his baffling suicide. Others, to whom Mossman is an unknown name, may be puzzled as to the play's larger metaphorical meaning…. A famous Panorama interview, where he was deemed to have harassed Harold Wilson over Vietnam, saw Mossman's BBC star decline to the point where he fronted arts programmes. But it was the death of Louis, as much as anything, that led to the slow unravelling of Mossman's own life. To his credit, Wright avoids the romantic cliche that Mossman killed himself out of grief. He suggests that a number of factors may have contributed to Mossman's suicide…. Wright also captures precisely the internal politics of institutional existence…. The play is given a perfectly pitched production from Richard Eyre and a commanding performance from Ben Chaplin, who as Mossman exudes patrician insecurity. Paul Ritter as Robin Day, Bruce Alexander as a current affairs apparatchik, and Chris New as the erratic Louis also provide exemplary support. But, much as I enjoyed the evening, it is one that, like Mossman himself, leaves its mysteries unresolved.”
Benedict Nightingale in the Times (3 stars) – “It would have been good to see and hear more about the events that left Mossman wondering about how detached, or how involved, a reporter should be…. (Wright) doesn’t seem to give much credence to the idea that Mossman was burnt out or professionally frustrated. We see the man politely fired from Panorama, allowed to make quirky films about ordinary people, refusing to ditch a relatively unimportant interview to cover the death of Robert Kennedy, settling into the oubliette of arts TV, and rediscovering and befriending an eccentric Rosamond Lehmann; but the only event that seems greatly to disturb him is the death by overdose of his lover, a troubled erratic Canadian potter played by Chris New. Maybe that was ‘it’. Yet Richard Eyre’s pacy production and Chaplin’s fine, measured performance leave one with a portrait of a cool, confident, tough-minded man basically as hidden as one of le Carré’s spies.”
Nicholas de Jongh in the Evening Standard (4 stars) – “Nicholas Wright's fascinating play, witty about both BBC manners and changing Sixties morals, imagines its way into the disturbed mind of a still-surviving class of Englishman…. Ben Chaplin as Mossman gives a magnificent performance of shuttered politesse…. Yet sardonic Mossman was neither tame nor docile when up against authority. Richard Eyre's immaculate production dramatises an ancient Panorama interview led by Paul Ritter's amusing Robin Day…. Just once the mask is wrenched off and a remarkable, shattered Chaplin weeps real tears…. Wright's weakness is that the second half shows a resurgent, novel-writing Mossman, supported by Angela Thorne's imperious novelist, Rosamond Lehmann, who put her faith in spiritualism. If the suicide that Mossman plans with meticulous calm has to do with his secret, discarded career in MI6 or his abiding guilt that he did not save Louis, Wright fights shy of saying so…. I believe that a play about the suicide of a well known somebody whose friends and perhaps relations are still alive should be based on fact and not on fantasies or inventions. It would have been fairer if Mossman had been given a pseudonym and a programme note included saying the play was based on some events in his life.”
Rhoda Koenig in the Independent – “The more we learn about Mossman, the more walls we run into. Homosexual in a conservative milieu, an objective commentator, and a part-time spy, Mossman was professionally, as well as emotionally, elusive. But a slippery character can still fascinate. Unfortunately, Ben Chaplin, for most of the evening, stands with his arms folded across his chest and speaks in a guarded tone of voice. He's lovely to look at, but the lack of charm or command (at least one is a newsman's necessity) is obvious…. Mossman, however, isn't nearly so much of a pain as his lover, Louis, a young man whose disdainful, holier-than-thou pronouncements about Mossman's lack of artistic integrity are clearly motivated by envy…. Fortunately, there are plenty of other characters, and Wright seems to have had as much fun in writing them as we have in listening to them. Bruce Alexander, as Mossman's producer, deftly creates the echt BBC man, twisted into a corkscrew of embarrassment by the reporter's ‘chum’ but setting aside all squeamishness to be both kindly and practical at a time of pain and sorrow. Paul Ritter does a hilarious impersonation of Robin Day, coming across as more appealing than the real one deserves. Angela Thorne steals away with much of the show as Mossman's friend Rosamund Lehmann.”
James Mossman, a brilliant foreign reporter and presenter on the BBC’s Panorama current affairs programme during its heyday, committed suicide in 1971, leaving a note in his Norfolk cottage: “I can’t bear it any longer, though I don’t know what ‘it’ is.”
Nicholas Wright’s new play, directed by former NT boss Richard Eyre, attempts to define what the “it” was in the form of a wide-ranging investigation presented by the dead reporter himself. Although Mossman, charismatically played by Ben Chaplin, emerges as an interesting, conflicted character who exchanged the dangers of the Vietnam War for the security of a television studio, there are no final answers to the question. That knotty ambiguity in the play is both its unusual strength and its slight weakness as theatre.
In a programme note, Wright explains how he worked as an assistant floor manager at the BBC and knew Mossman slightly, having also once known Mossman’s lover, the Canadian potter Louis, slightly better.
Working on fragmentary information, much as he did with his play about van Gogh, Vincent in Brixton, Wright creates an enthralling tapestry of guilt, grief and radical and BBC politics in an age of crumbling public propriety. The result combines elements of Tom Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ Roll and Peter Morgan’s Frost/Nixon, with a smattering of Alan Bennett’s speciality in homosexual spies, those heavy-drinking gay deceivers.
Mossman – a tall, rangy man with a piercing gaze and a frank, disarming manner – was once likened by a colleague to a cross between Lawrence of Arabia and Cassius. Chaplin looks nothing like him yet catches him exactly, especially in his dryness, watchfulness and emotional integrity.
Rob Howell’s design recreates the grey television studio where Robin Day (a brilliant impersonation by Paul Ritter), known as “cruel glasses,” has replaced the Churchillian gravitas of a sick Richard Dimbleby and where Mossman allows his anger about Britain’s support for the Americans in Vietnam to boil over in an interview with Harold Wilson (Patrick Brennan, who conveys the Yorkshire bluffness of the former Labour PM but not his guile or slipperiness).
The resulting internal fracas (Bruce Alexander is the hilarious embodiment of shifty, dry-mouthed apparatchik life in the BBC corridors) sees Mossman demoted to arts programmes. But his involvement with Louis (Chris New, fresh from his exciting debut in Bent) has already led him to follow a soft feature story in San Francisco instead of dashing to Los Angeles to cover the Robert Kennedy assassination.
After Louis is found dead from an overdose of barbiturates, Mossman seeks reconciliation with him through his friendship with the novelist Rosamond Lehmann (a wonderfully distracted Angela Thorne), whose psychic novel has made a great impression on him.
Lehmann talks about “crossing over” instead of dying, and when Mossman tells Robin Day that he is thinking of doing so, Day assumes he is going to ITV. There are many such good jokes in an evening that may not pack a final punch but which clearly offers the best new play of the year so far. And Gillian Raine is a small, cameo delight as Mossman’s real mother; his other legendary “mother” is the formidable BBC floor manager Joan Marsden (Tilly Tremayne).
I wonder if anyone under a certain age will get much from this play, superb though it is. For those of us who remember how influential 'Panorama' was in the Dimbleby days and just after, there is a certain satisfaction in the purely nostalgic aspect of the piece (the audience at this afternoon's matinee was almost wholly over the age of 50). Why should anyone care, after all tjis time, why James Mossman killed himself, especially when, as portrayed by Ben Chaplin, he appears to have been such a cold, unattached man? Yet, Nicholas Wright, in the best new play put on by the NT for ages, manages to make us care what the 'it' was which Mossman could no longer take. It is a moot point whether Wright offers, in the end, a solution to the puzzle. A suicide which had such a long, drawn-out gestation period has not the power to shock or even to make one sympathise with it, for it seems too contrived, too deliberate. But the play is always riveting, and contains several very fine perfomances. I could not relate to Chaplin's Mossman, but that was probably deliberate. He manages to distance himself from the audience, only showing genuine emotion when losing his temper during an interview with Harold Wilson. Outstanding was Angela Thorne as Rosamund Lehmann, and Paul Ritter as Robin Day managed to avoid caricature while giving a brilliant characterisation. - sc
12 May 07
Almost at the end, Ben Chaplin's James Mossman is told to "keep it ambiguous" and Nicholas Wright has certainly achieved that with a play that sems unsure if it is a detective story trying to discover the motives behind a suicide or a political and cultural refelction of the '60s. Richard Eyre's highly Donmaresque production (even the black rear wall is present) suffers from having a lead character, present in every scene, who is almost completely devoid of charm. There are terrific cameos from Angela Thorne, Bruce Alexander and, in particular, Tilly Tremayne. The best scene by far is the Panorama interview with Harold Wilson when Mossman sheds his detachment and harangues the Prime Minister for his support of America in an unpopular war. The parallels are clear, as seems compulsary in any new play these days. The Reporter is never less than interesting but it is difficult to care about such an emotionally cold character. - David Baxter
11 May 07
A terrific performance from Ben Chaplin who really gets inside the character of James Mossman. One of those evenings the National are so good at producing and makes me want to keep coming back. One other performance in particular to pick out is Paul Ritter's Robin Day - utterly hilarious and convincing. Well Done. - rds
23 Mar 07
Funny, sad, poignant, evocative, beautifully performed. The best straiht play I've seen in the West End for simply ages. Highly recommended. - ANGELA BEECHING
23 Feb 07
Though it's a somewhat impenetrable and inconclusive play, there's a beautiful sense of mystery and period that draws you in. The central performance by Ben Chaplin is terrific, and it's supported by a wonderful ensemble. Richard Eyre's DocuNoir (a new genre!) production has his trademark attention to detail. Flawed but well worth a visit. - Gareth James
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