Richard Bean's plays are popular, funny and totally unrestrained by good taste or political correctness. If he was a newspaper, he would be a red-top. This is the key to his hilarious demolition job on the culture of tabloid journalism and phone-hacking in Great Britain, now playing at the National Theatre's Lyttelton stage.
Bean's play stars Billie Piper, last seen at the National in The Effect, as Page Britain, the totally amoral and ambitious news editor of the Free Press, the South Bank's answer to the News of the World. Bean is clever enough not to create just a fictional version of Rebekah Brooks, but to pick and mix elements of all the phone-hacking story's leading lights and one or two other leading tabloid journalists as well. Andy Coulson, Piers Morgan, Kelvin McKenzie and one or two other legendary red-top editors may well recognise some elements of their characters on stage, if they can blag a ticket.
I loved Bean's England People Very Nice and his hilariously funny One Man, Two Guvnors, though I was much less keen on The Heretic, which was something of a rant about climate change. This new play has fun not just at the expense of the tabloids but also takes a poke at the Guardian ('The Guardener, the paper that thinks so that you don't have to') and makes satirical mincemeat of the Metropolitan Police. Piper's character ends up not just metaphorically but literally in bed with the one of the boys in blue.
I won't spoil the jokes by repeating them, but Aaron Neil gives a performance to savour as Sully Kassam, the Met's terminally incompetent foot-in-mouth boss, the first Asian gay to hold the job. There's a large cast (possibly a bit too large) and Piper is outstanding. Nicholas Hytner directs with his usual brio, and Tim Hatley's flexible set design fits the play's short scenes and video inserts perfectly.
Will this play become a classic like Ben Hecht's The Front Page? No it won't. It lacks The Front Page's engaging double storyline and plot buildup, its subtle characterisation and its love-hate attitude to popular journalism. There's not much ambiguity about Bean's writing; as with the red-tops, you know what you are getting -- a thwack over the head with an inflated pig's bladder. It's deservedly earned a swift transfer to the Theatre Royal Haymarket, following in the footsteps of One Man, Two Guvnors. Go and see it.
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