When Winston Went to War with the Wireless (NHB Modern Plays)

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It was a tiny startup, staffed by a group of young war veterans, misfits, impresarios, intellectuals and engineers. He is torn apart, in flashbacks, by his passionate and requited love for a man, Luke Newberry's Charlie Bowser (who he is willing subsequently to share his wife, Muriel, with! But when Reith is in direct conflict with Adrian Scarborough’s suave, humorous yet furious and blustering Churchill, the play blazes into life, the strength of their arguments swinging from side to side. There’s also an interesting if incongruous sub-plot about Reith’s conflicted personal life that is begging to be allowed the breathing space of an entire drama of its own.

At the moment, his play The Motive and the Cue, about the famously rocky process of putting together John Gielgud’s production of Hamlet starring Richard Burton, is at the National Theatre in London. That outcome is threatened in 1926, during the general strike, which extends the reach of Reith’s wireless service in the absence of newspapers (the presses went on strike too). This show wasn’t high on my list of things to see but after loving Motive and the Cue and listening to this, I’m now definitely interested! The Financial Times and its journalism are subject to a self-regulation regime under the FT Editorial Code of Practice. A nice balance between dramatic / emotional and really laugh out loud comedic moments ( and songs) made for a wonderful evening of theatre.But Thorne also fascinatingly explores deeper questions of personal morality and hubris within two deeply arrogant men. 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. 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. The play begins previews at the Donmar Warehouse on 2 June, ahead of an opening night on 13 June, and performances to 29 July.

When Winston Went to War with the Wireless is the clumsy and misleading title of a new play about John Reith’s stewardship of the BBC during the 1926 general strike. The fledgling BBC, founded only three years before by John Reith, finds itself on the horns of a dilemma – should it report the objective truth of the strike, police brutality and all?

He is torn apart by his pursuit of principle, of giving a fair airing on the new BBC radio service, to opposition politicians and the Unions, and his desire to kowtow to a Government that could wrest control of the BBC away from him. In recent years, he’s tackled child abuse, the plight of care homes in the pandemic, and a Grenfell-like catastrophe that devastates a community. The feud between Conservative politicians and our national broadcaster is almost as old as the BBC itself, as Jack Thorne’s wily new play reminds us. Lee Curran’s lighting streaks the bare stage with shadows; when at the end the ground is stacked with candles and the stage golden with lights, it is as if the lovers have indeed been cut out into stars. He suggests Churchill might have been more like his uber-fan Boris Johnson than is usually admitted.

The craggy and godly Reith is shown, in a gently revealing performance by Stephen Campbell Moore, as riven by his love for a young man. One terrible, marvellous account is unforgettable: of a young soldier who could not be near when his mother was cooking – the sound of boiling or frying made him scream. The BBC has constantly found itself pinched by Government crows, this was the first pinching and it feels an ever more apposite time to bring it to the stage. Yet nothing takes away from the propulsion of an evening driven not by mooning romance but by danger – in a tumultuous twilight. There’s lovely support from Haydn Gwynne as Prime Minister Stanley “Safety First” Baldwin, attempting to prevent both the country and Churchill from derailing.

Yet the relentless energy of the early scenes does not move naturally into the self-discovery of the ending in Danny Rubin’s book or Minchin’s music. But I’m not sure that makes this play illuminatingper se, it simply points out how little things have changed. Photograph: Marc Brenner Isis Hainsworth and Toheeb Jimoh, the ‘magnetic centre’ of Romeo and Juliet at the Almeida.