This story of a once great journalist is heartbreaking, yet somehow dull
The Reporter Cottesloe Theatre, London SE1
Well, I'm a complete failure - or at least I am according to the BBC foreign correspondent James Mossman, who was the corporation's star turn in the mid-1960s. Contemplating his imminent removal from the top of the bulletin after savaging Harold Wilson over Vietnam on live television, Mossman realises that his future life in the media might come down to "reviewing for the New Statesman". In the end, it was a bit grimmer than even that.
Nicholas Wright's play The Reporter takes us through the perplexing career of a man who, he suggests, was tipped to be the next Richard Dimbleby, but who blew it via "a highly tuned ability to conceal, or an inability not to".
Handsome and clever, Mossman had a great deal to attend to besides reportage. There was the job as an MI6 operative, and then there was his love affair with Louis, a highly strung Canadian potter. In the end, it all came clattering down. The MI6 job faded away; Louis died of an enthusiastic relationship with booze and barbiturates; Mossman was banished to the hinterland of BBC Arts. "I can't bear it any more," read his suicide note, "though I don't know what 'it' is." Mossman killed himself in 1971.
Wright tries to work out what the "it" is, but the signal problem is that this play, though well acted and immaculately directed by Richard Eyre, will ignite only for people who can remember who Mossman was.
On the night I went, I sat next to Sir Jeremy Isaacs, who, as it turned out, had attended Louis's funeral. "We were all invited to kiss his corpse," Isaacs told me, with a shudder. Without such insights, however, Mossman stays rather fixedly within the television studio where Rob Howell has set the entire play. It's not really his fault. The nature of the foreign correspondent, apart from the singular force that is John Simpson, can be low-key. Fine for TV news, but a big brick wall for theatre.
Ben Chaplin, playing the title role, is very good-looking and wields a microphone with great authority, but gets no further because Mossman, at least as we see him here, is simply rather dull. He is certainly no David Frost, a man we all love to know because Frostie is, and was, a Character - which, of course, gives Peter Morgan's Frost/Nixon an impetus completely lacking here.
"You only become real in sex," shouts Louis at Mossman. It's not a moment we see, but I can believe it. Mossman is so given to mediaspeak that he cannot walk through a garden without descending into clichés about crocuses in the morning, or, at one point, "the lost world of the Morris Minor". Wright may well be making a clever point, but forcing your hero to communicate in soundbites is a theatrical cul-de-sac, particularly if he is appearing beside such a subtle and nuanced cast.
Particularly outstanding is Angela Thorne as the novelist Rosamond Lehmann, tempted out of retirement for an exclusive interview with Mossman. Lehmann's trembling gratitude for the ensuing publicity allows us to witness briefly the fear of anonymity towering behind the out-of-print author, who, for all her twinset-and-pearls hauteur, still longs to be read.
Wright, himself a floor assistant on Panorama in the 1960s, brilliantly captures the bitchy yet worthy spirit of Television Centre. As "Ray Ray", head of current affairs, a man whose cardigans and middle-class mannerisms mask a deep kindness, Bruce Alexander is a delight. And Paul Ritter makes a hilarious Robin Day - a prima donna who throws his toys out of the pram if someone moves his pencil. I found Louis (Chris New) intensely irritating, but then again, manic potters probably are an annoying bunch.
I suspect a lot will be made of this play - which says more about the media's cannibalistic tendencies than anything else. But I left the theatre feeling rather sorry for Mossman, a man who cannot be brought to life, not even in an entire play written about him.
For further info and booking details: http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk
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