Ben Chaplin and Chris New
in The Reporter
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Gertrude Stein once famously observed, “When you get there, there isn’t any there there,” a truth that applies to many things in life. How grim is it to feel that about the core of your own life and being, though? In articulating this emotional vacuum in The Reporter, a new play about the real-life journalist James Mossman, playwright Nicholas Wright has to negotiate the essential pitfall that there may no there there to his play, either. His lead character is so emotionally enigmatic that it’s difficult to get a handle on him.
The play begins with his death, as Mossman—a reporter to the end and now even after it—pours over the suicide note he left behind and becomes our narrator. He reconstructs the circumstances that led to his end, and seeks to find out what exactly he meant in that note when he wrote, “I can’t bear it any more, though I don’t what ‘it’ is.”
Richard Eyre’s taut production unfolds seamlessly on Rob Howell’s simple but effective set that effortlessly switches between numerous different locations. It is like a fluidly paced detective story as the clues are gathered. But even if layer after layer is stripped away in search of the truth only to reveal that it may be a question that can never be answered, the play takes us on a gripping and painful personal journey as it seeks to do so.
Ben Chaplin in The Reporter
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After last year’s Frost/Nixon, Peter Morgan’s riveting speculation on the behind-the-scenes work of a piece of television history, The Reporter is also a backstage glance at the journalistic life of a man who, like David Frost, made history in his confrontational political interviews.
But if Frost’s daring in taking on Nixon was the making of him, Mossman’s stand was a kind of professional suicide long before he took his own life, when he found himself relegated to the Siberia of hosting arts programmes. “Admit that you’re supporting a war that you know to be immoral and foolish, out of sheer abject subservience to the United States?” That isn’t Jeremy Paxman quizzing Tony Blair, but rather Mossman trenchantly grilling Harold Wilson about his support of the U.S. policy on Vietnam.
[AD]Mossman is also fighting wars with his own demons and those of his deeply damaged relationship with his drug-addicted Canadian artist partner Louis. As the play switches between the professional and the personal and the uncomfortable overlaps that this sometimes brings about, it builds into a haunting portrait of one man’s fallibility in the face of his own genius.
Ben Chaplin is outstanding as a man who was as dispassionate in observing his life as he was in living it: he brings enormous charisma and appeal to the role, but also a painful vulnerability below the surface that is heartbreaking. Though none of the supporting characters register nearly as strongly in either the writing or the performances, there are strong cameos from Tilly Tremayne as Joan Marsden (a.k.a. "Mother") the floor manager on Panorama, Paul Ritter as Robin Day, the TV interviewer with whom Mossman shared the screen, Chris New as Mossman’s lover and Angela Thorne as Rosamond Lehmann, the novelist that was Mossman’s good friend.
Like its lead character, Wright’s play may ultimately resist easy categorisation, but it’s also as animated, intelligent and fascinating as he was.
The Reporter
By Nicholas Wright
Directed by Richard Eyre
National Theatre/Cottesloe