Seamy World of the British Tabloid Arrives Onstage
Richard Bean’s ‘Great Britain’ Opens at the National

Which one is she? Where is the woman we have gathered here to see pilloried? Where is, you know, Rebekah Brooks? A rather ingenious moment of audience-baiting confusion occurs amid the hail of dum-dum bullets called Great Britain — Richard Bean’s relentless satire about the phone-hacking scandal that brought down a newspaper — which opened on Monday night at the National Theater amid gleeful expectations. Up to that point, we have assumed that the onstage stand-in for Ms. Brooks, the sphinxlike news executive at the center of the corruption investigation into Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World, is the play’s title character, Paige Britain, played by a bodaciously blonde Billie Piper. But suddenly in a scene set on the yacht of a Murdoch-like mogul, a new suspect slithers into view, a lissome figure with curly auburn hair and a Mona Lisa smile. The audience laughs at this apparition — a rival, it turns out, to our unscrupulous heroine and named Virginia White (note the scansion), played by Jo Dockery. For she is the spitting — or should we say salivating? — image of our Ms. Brooks.