The Reporter

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?

Our Review:

22 February 2007

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 b...

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Latest User Review

sc - 12 May 2007:

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. ...

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