The Reporter (NHB Modern Plays) (Nick Hern Books)

by NicholasWright (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  2007

  $22.82

  Richard Eyre directs National Theatre premiere of major new play by the Olivier, award-winning author of Vincent in Brixton . Set in London, Saigon, San Francisco - and East Anglia - in the late 1960s, this is the true story of James Mossman, a difficult but brilliant BBC reporter and ex-MI6 agent, who killed himself in 1971. This play asks why. We see Mossman in Vietnam where he witnesses the self-immolation of a Buddhist monk in protest at the war; we see him making an incoherent film on Revolution in 1968; we see him haranguing Harold Wilson in the Panorama studio; and we see him rediscovering the long-neglected Rosamund Lehmann. We also see a startlingly different private face in scenes with his mother and above all with Louis, his mentally unstable Canadian lover, who died of a (probably accidental) overdose and whose death it may have been that destroyed Mossman himself. Deftly constructed, The Reporter is totally engrossing and often very moving in its multi-layered but pleasing complexity. Nicholas Wright, who created Vincent in Brixton and adapted His Dark Materials , is clearly at work again. The play premieres at the National Theatre in February 2007 in a major production directed by Richard Eyre that offers a terrific role to a star actor yet to be cast.