The 1976 Academy Award winning film Network was a broad satire on television, its news programming and society in general. Lee Hall (Billy Elliot) has adapted Paddy Chayefsky’s celebrated screenplay for the stage. What is perhaps most striking is that the story seems less satirical and more grounded in our current reality. Imagine an America whose citizens want their television personalities to express their rage out loud.
According to anchorman Howard Beale, the world is a “demented slaughterhouse.” His viewership is poor and he gets fired. On his program, he announces a plan to kill himself on air the following week. Ranting and raving about all of life’s “bullshit,” his ratings begin to increase. He morphs into an angry prophet denouncing the hypocrisy of our times. The people respond. He may be off his rocker but good ratings equal good profits.
Bryan Cranston (All the Way, Breaking Bad) is riveting in the role that won Peter Finch a posthumous Oscar. There is a scene where the camera is rolling and he cannot muster the focus, strength, courage or words to begin speaking. It’s just dead air and a tormented face. The television executives argue whether to cut him off. They don’t and what eventually follows is a superlative rant for the ages.
Mr. Cranston is so good in the madman crazy sections that the latter stages of the play seem a tad too sane. (I’ll admit that the story arc does seems quite believable today.) Unfortunately much of what surrounds this enthralling performance is either innocuously bland or annoying distracting. As director, Ivo Van Hove often stages plays with multimedia projections. For a show about the medium of television, this makes sense. The parade of television commercials from the 1970’s is fun, especially when Mr. Cranston is offstage and you want something interesting to pay attention to.
On stage there are theatergoers on one side sitting at a bar. Network backstage operations are filled with people, screens and electronics on the other side. With much of Mr. Cranston’s performance projected on screen, there are studio employees milling about, often blocking the actors from view. The recorded music and other assorted noises which blare out on speakers throughout the play are simply annoying after awhile. I suppose the frenetic staging is supposed to be disarming and purposely unfocused. The problem is that the excesses don’t cover up the weaknesses well enough.
The play as presented is over two hours without an intermission. At least fifteen minutes could have been trimmed without any loss of style or substance. The actors surrounding Mr. Cranston competently say their lines but real characters do not emerge. As Diana Christensen, Tatiana Maslany (Mary Page Marlowe, Orphan Black) is not nearly as manipulative or ruthless as needed. We don’t need to like her. She is a villain and a climber. Tony Goldwyn (Promises, Promises, Scandal) plays a bewildered Max Schumacher going through the motions of life without the necessary emotive conflicts to make us understand him. His passions are spoken about but not evidenced. (Their sex scene was hilarious though.)
After the curtain call, snippets from the swearing in ceremonies of United States’ Presidents are shown. Images from more than half a century, finishing with Trump who is predictably booed. This pandering to the theater audience is insipid. Did the creative team think we needed this coda to draw parallels to now?
Arthur Jensen (Nick Wyman, excellent) appears as the wealthy network Chairman who convinces Howard Beale to become a television prophet. His scene is set on a high platform suggesting a godlike figure. His worldview is not based on countries anymore but is a collage of corporations. Presumably the Trump footage was intended to highlight that viewpoint in bold.
Network can be recommended as very good theater particularly notable for Bryan Cranston’s extraordinary performance. If you don’t know the story from the film, that is another reason to go. The show suffers a little from technological excess as the images become more important than the people. It’s theatrical for sure but not necessarily more interesting (or disturbing) than what is broadcast on television every day.