Golden-hearted fable or Cheesy Nincompoopery?
Critical Perspectives on Nicholas Wright's TRAVELLING LIGHT

Nicholas Wright's TRAVELLING LIGHT, written for the National Theatre in London - his third new play in less than a year - has produced some widely differing responses from the London critics, which suggests that Indian audiences may also be as sharply divided in their reactions. Directed by the National's chief, Nicholas Hytner, it stars the enormously popular Antony Sher as a Hollywood movie producer who looks back on his earlier years of poverty in a Jewish stetl somewhere in Eastern Europe. There, in his attempts to use an early movie camera, he comes up with some of the trademark effects of the silent cinema.

That this stage play about film-making is being transmitted to a world audience as film, in the National Theatre Live franchise, is a little like Shakespeare writing parts for boys to play women - who then dress up as boys. Writing in the Guardian, Michael Billington gave the play a warm welcome. For him, Wright has 'come up with a love letter to the movies and an appealingly intelligent evocation of the Jewish folk culture that formed the basis of American cinema.' Sher's performance is 'one of those in which the actor seems to have expanded to twice his normal size.' Libby Purves was just as captivated, writing in The Times that 'It is a golden-hearted tragicomic fable, never knowingly underacted ... Act Two is so wonderfully hokum that it could have come straight out of the 1936 Hollywood where it is set.'

Jane Edwardes of the Sunday Times was less enthusiastic, finding the ending too improbable for a play that is 'charming, fun and informative, but has too many awkward moments entirely to convince.' While Quentn Letts in the Daily Mail and Lloyd Evans in the Spectator were completely against the production, turning in damning reviews. For Letts, it was 'theatrical Gorgonzola - laughably cliched, weirdly wooden, incredible in the literal sense.' Evans goes even further: 'Last November I suggested that Nicholas Hytner had gone mad. Now he confirms the diagnosis with a new satire by Nicholas Wright, TRAVELLING LIGHT, which is the most embarrassing and mindless blunder I've ever seen on a subsidised stage... Quite what inspired this parochial burst of kulak-basing nicompoopery I can't say.'

Golden-hearted fable or cheesy nincompoopery? Indian audiences will have the chance to make up their own minds. One aspect of the production is that even its harshest critics have enjoyed its remarkably authentic recreations of silent movies, the work of Jon Driscoll, which should be even more effective when seen on screen, as intended.

*TRAVELLING LIGHT will be screened at the NCPA in Mumbai on 18^th and 19^th February 2012 in collaboration with National Theatre Live. Please click here to find out more.

Ian Herbert is a London based theatre critic. Former President of the International Association of Theatre Critics (IATC), Ian Herbert is Consulting Editor of Theatre Record, which he found in 1980. Theatre Record is a chronicle of the British stage and acts as valuable documentation and a reference guide for anyone interested in past and present theatre in the UK. To find out more about Theatre Record, visit www.theatrerecord.org