Seamy World of the British Tabloid Arrives Onstage
Richard Bean’s ‘Great Britain’ Opens at the National
Ben Brantley
July 1, 2014: 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.
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