The spectacular Network set (Picture: Jan Versweyveld)

Network, the NT’s weighty new media satire, stars Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston on excellent form, and is based on a four-time Oscar-winning film. With the media as its inspiration, the National’s Lyttelton Theatre has been polished up into a lifelike, and life-size, TV set.

Paddy Chayefsky’s Seventies hit film cleaned up at the Oscars, winning Best Actor, Actress, Supporting Actress and Original Screenplay, and thanks (pah, no thanks!) to the current US political scene, Network’s themes of exploitation in the media make this play as ripely contemporary now as it did then.

Bryan Cranston is filmed live and projected onto big screens (Picture: Jan Versweyveld)

Cranston plays clapped-out news anchor Howard Beale, who after decades of reading the news basically loses his mind live on camera one night and declares the news ‘bullshit’. This riles the cranky old studio execs, who naturally think the anchor has committed ratings suicide for the network, UBS. However, savvy young innovator Diana has other ideas, and exploits Howard’s relentlessly acerbic broadcasts as sensation, keeping him in prime time and rubbing her grubby mitts together as ratings soar and viewers tune into his ranty broadcasts.



The play that follows is basically a sum of two parts: Cranston’s anthemic, tour-de-force performance as Beale, which, borrowed from the greatest Shakespeares (King Lear in particular) is a pronounced study in the internalised chaos of existence that we all feel from time to time, only laid out in a slightly barmy ‘big media’ way.


Bryan Cranston in Network (Picture: Jan Versweyveld)

The other half of Network is the remarkably ambitious staging, which is the combined effort of theatre giant Ivo Van Hove’s direction, Jan Versweyveld’s set and lighting design and Tal Yarden’s immense video production. For us to feel the pressure, emotion and chaos that’s going on in UBS’s television studio, live, we’re treated to an audio-visual theatre spectacle which grips until the last.

Van Hove is playing with the timelessly relateable notion that media consumes us, in our darkest moments as well as our lightest. Howard’s internalised breakdowns are filmed on a series of live monitors, as directors shove buttons as they prime his emotional experience to craft the best telly.

A dramatic scene from Network (Picture: Jan Versweyveld)

From our seats, it’s a vividly dark experience, watching chaos be carefully puppeteered into a spectacle – it’s show business, and it’s not a pretty sight.

And on the surface, Van Hove smartly treats us to a live technological experience that is stimulating as a stand alone cultural ‘thing’. Technology is everywhere as actors wander out, onto the South Bank, and film by the river before wandering back into the theatre and onto the stage; the show is simply an exercise in shocking staging too, and it creates pace defiantly.

Network makes the point that media is ultimately business, and so to make money it much exploit every last opportunity. Van Hove personally engulfs his audience with technicality that becomes overbearing – spectacular theatre, but invasive, and all-consuming.

The staging is ambitious (Picture: Jan Versweyveld)

Script adopter Lee Hall has packed the show with tightly meaningful quotes you can stuff in your pocket and take home, like ‘the only truth is the truth that comes out of your television’.

If the first twenty or so minutes seemed fearful of copying the cinematic formula of fast-paced line-tossing, Network quickly evened out into well-paced and well-written for the theatre.

We’re not at the Oscars this time, but best supporting actor gongs should go to Michelle Dockery’s Diana, and Douglas Henshall’s Max, who are perfect as icons of old TV versus an era of new.

A scene from Network at the National (Picture: Jan Versweyveld)

They have an affair to bolster their own agendas – he, who has fallen out of love with his wife, craves passion again and she who craves his job so she can innovative the TV network. Dockery harnesses the boisterous temperament of Diana well as she climbs the ranks, and Henshall captures Max’s timid risk taking soberingly.



Van Hove manages to rescue the moments of high emotion from ever feeling too sentimental. Instead, stylish scene changes juxtapose the grating world of television against mankind’s struggle against loneliness. In the end, it’s a stomach-turning ride.

TV is big business, and so’s the theatre: the house for Network is packed out until the end of its run, although day tickets and returns are available by checking the show’s website.

Network runs at the National Theatre’s Lyttelton Theatre until March 24.

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