EARLY in David Hare and Howard Brenton’s Pravda, the South African magnate who has bought the upmarket Daily Victory is introduced to a chap lying under a desk. He’s the drama critic and he’s just been to a lunchtime theatre, but, asked by his new boss whether he observes plays objectively, he gives a drunken gasp and returns to oblivion.
Thanks, Dave and Howie. (As I pen this beneath my hotel bed I know it’s just your little joke.)
The trouble is that Hare and Brenton weren’t just joking when they wrote their “Fleet Street comedy” in 1985. They wanted to say something serious about the decline both of British journalism — were our broadsheets really more truthful than Soviet-era Pravda? — and Britain itself. It was this that left the late Bernard Levin fulminating that the play was “an illiterate strip-cartoon, cruder by far than the worst excesses of any newspaper with photos depicting the trouserless vicar and the bellringer’s wife”.
Levin was right in one respect. The authors revealed more than they realised when they artlessly admitted that their research consisted of visiting Maxwell’s Mirror and reading “all the papers from cover to cover”. Almost every time they write about journalism itself, they display ignorance. I can’t see The Times’s night editor rewriting a story to suggest that Greenham Common women injured by police actually injured themselves. Nor will you find a proprietor firing men with names he dislikes.
The obvious explanation is that the play is a Jonsonian farce about a newspaper takeover. But that’s not quite good enough. The authors also want us to shudder at the ease with which right-wing Lambert Le Roux betters a corrupt British establishment and sneers at the nation. But how can one heed him when his foes are fools with names like Fruit-Norton and Whicker-Basket?
Advertisement
The play is awkwardly marooned between characters like Oliver Dimsdale’s eager Andrew May and Zoe Waites as his earnest wife, who are thwarted by Le Roux when they try to expose government duplicity, and caricatures like Bruce Alexander’s snobbish Fruit-Norton. Yet Lambert himself remains memorable.
Anthony Hopkins, who created him, gave us an upturned turtle, a slow-moving reptile dangerously smiling from above its shell. At Chichester, Roger Allam comes with a thick body, bared teeth and dangling arms. He’s a sort of killer-gorilla — and deserves a less patchy play in which to display his malign energy.
Box-office: 01243-781312