Network
Opening Night: November 13, 2017
Closing: March 24, 2018
Theater: National Theatre
I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore.
Howard Beale, news anchorman, isn’t pulling in the viewers. In his final broadcast he unravels live on screen. But when the ratings soar, the network seize on their newfound populist prophet, and Howard becomes the biggest thing on TV.
Network depicts a dystopian media landscape where opinion trumps fact. Hilarious and horrifying by turns, the iconic film by Paddy Chayefsky won four Academy Awards in 1976. Now, Lee Hall (Billy Elliot, Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour) and director Ivo Van Hove(Hedda Gabler) bring his masterwork to the stage for the first time, with Bryan Cranston (Breaking Bad) in the role of Howard Beale.
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November 14, 2017
LONDON — If there were such a thing as an instant ulcer, then the first five minutes of the National Theater’s production of “Network,” which opened here on Monday night, would be guaranteed to give you one. This is meant as high praise.
The opening scene of this convulsive, immersive adaptation of the 1976 movie about how television hijacked reality is a bravura exercise in torturously applied pressure. Directed by Ivo van Hove and starring a fabulous Bryan Cranston in a state of radioactive meltdown, “Network” may be set in the New York of four decades ago, but as you watch the middle-aged newscaster, Howard Beale (Mr. Cranston), preparing for his nightly television appearance, you feel the overwhelming anxiety of a toxic 21st-century day at the office.
You know, one of those mornings when you’ve arrived late and cranky, and everyone and everything in your technology-driven workplace seems out to get you.
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