Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? The time is 1926 and, as director Katy Rudd makes clear with a striking opening tableau that is a symphonic cacophony of manual labour, the country is gripped by industrial unrest. Led by the miners, a General Strike is declared, with the aim of bringing the country to a halt. Newspapers cannot be printed at this time, which presents a sudden gap – and therefore an unexpected opportunity – in national communications. Who will fill it: the government, or the British Broadcasting Company, as it then was? Ravin J Ganatra, Mariam Haque, Adrian Scarborough and Kevin McMonagle in the play (Photo: Manuel Harlan)

Thorne adds: “I hope this whole play is a love letter to the BBC. I hope this whole play is a love letter to people in authority and how they find their way through these crises. Because I wouldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it.” Greg is an award-winning writer with a huge passion for theatre. He has appeared on stage, as well as having directed several plays in his native Scotland. There are laughs too, mostly provided by the variety acts that populated the Beeb in between news segments: Haydn Gwynne's singer's assertion that you shouldn't be "cruel to a vegetab(uel)" made me laugh, though the biggest laugh belonged to the versatile Luke Newberry, whose skit, about the lies he would tell his Mum to prevent her discovering he was an actor, was laugh-out-loud hilarious!In 1926 the fledgling BBC can only broadcast news at 7pm, because there’s a fear that earlier broadcasts might damage newspaper circulation. When a general strike is called, the printing presses stop, and the only source of news is either the government’s own newspaper, The British Gazette edited by Churchill, or the wireless which younger readers will know as the radio. Likewise, the ethical compromises Reith makes to appease the government are fascinating, but feel like they’d have worked better in a show more explicitly about the Beeb. Haydn was due to appear in Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends at the Gielgud Theatre in London, however was forced to withdraw at short notice due to ill health. Ultimately, I just didn't think the story was deep enough. It was interesting, and especially the parallels between the situation in this play and the modern-day relationship between the Tory party and the BBC, but I don't think it needed two hours to tell it. The play’s title teases that Thorne, who wrote The Motive and the Cue and Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, is interested in the mano-a-mano encounter between Reith and Churchill. In fact, it’s more a character study in how Reith, the son of a Presbyterian minister, tried to balance his professional ambition with his conscience and sympathy for the strikers. Is he willing to sell his soul for the BBC’s future? Stephen Campbell Moore captures this fragile hauteur well; his Reith is a pine tree blown in a storm, buffeted by memories of his gay lover and duty to his neglected wife.

On TV, she has appeared in Drop the Dead Donkey (BAFTA nomination), The Crown (Netflix) and Channel 4’s The Windsors, playing Camilla.

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Apr 24, 2023 18:51:21 GMT londonpostie said:I just booked! You need to go deep into the run, though. I booked the last week. I wrote about Reith and the General Strike in This New Noise, my book about the BBC, and I still can’t decide what I really think about the episode. On the one hand, Reith did not hand over the BBC to Churchill, and he did broadcast communiques from the TUC as well as the government. On the other, he made some serious compromises – for example, bowing to pressure from prime minister Stanley Baldwin not to allow Ramsay MacDonald, the Labour leader, access to the airwaves. On stage her other recent credits include appearing in Anything Goes at the Barbican Theatre in London, and in Copenhagen at the Theatre Royal Bath.