Network at the National Theatre

I’m still sorting out my feelings about Network, the new stage adaptation of the 1976 movie about Howard Beale, the “I’m-mad-as hell-and-I’m-not-going-to-take-it-anymore!” newscaster. Is it a timely revival of a prophetic piece about the role of media and global corporations taking over our lives? Or is it self-important and meretricious? 

What’s undeniably captivating is the staging by Ivo van Hove and the lead performance by Bryan Cranston. The set is a headache-inducing complex of the cameras, projectors, and technicians that make up the set of a newsroom. Stage right is occupied by a glass booth of network technicians (and one of the four stage managers). Stage left is a restaurant where some lucky audience members watch the show while eating dinner. Giant projections of clocks counting down remind us that everything in television is choreographed to the second. Four musicians hovering over the set ensure that the soundscape keeps us tense and agitated for 2+ hours (no intermission). 

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Van Hove has created a play about network television that immerses us in the sensory overload of the media world: the actors we’re watching live are also projected onto a huge screen at the back of the stage (with a barely perceptible but unnerving tape delay). At times this screen goes to a test pattern or to commercials from the 1970s (Burger King, bras, even a Preparation H commercial with Bryan Cranston—here’s the link because you know you want to see it): 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdK8E8m56tA)

At one point, the camera follows two characters as they step outside the theater (rather disconcerting that, to see the Thames in the background of a play set in New York) and then pick them back up as they arrive for dinner with the audience members dining on stage. No, there’s no getting out of the mediaverse! 

Cranston is absolutely magnetic and convincing. But here’s the problem: what is he convincing us of? And just what is the “mad as hell” message? Is it a return to R D Laing’s idea that insanity is a sane response to an insane world? (I didn’t buy that idea then and I don’t buy it now.) Or our helpless rage at a corrupt system, our desire to call “bullshit!” on it all? 

The message feels confused to me. The play presents Cranston as the martyred truth teller, who reappears downstage (theater magic!) after his assassination to give us a homily about how we must reject received truths and ossified beliefs and choose to care for one another. I don’t recall this from the movie, and I’m not sure how well this follows from what came before. 

After all, what media figure, calling bullshit on that very media, propelled his populist rage into the presidency? And pretending to speak for the people has made a devil’s bargain with a reactionary establishment? The play tries to engage our own rage, which it does quite successfully in a screen montage following the curtain call. As the montage shows all the presidents from Ford to the present taking their oath of office, the audience cheers Obama and roundly boos Trump. Is this the way we reject received truths and choose to care for one another? Or is it just encouraging this quite elite audience to channel our own inward Howard Beale, our own presumably more enlightened rage? 

The play, like the movie, begins to get a handle on the dangers of the media world we live in. I think it falls into meretriciousness when it preaches back to its select audience what it already believes.