Great Britain 

National Theatre, London SE1

3/5

THIS is what a truly national theatre should be doing — presenting new plays on burning issues of the day, in this case a satirical dramatisation of the phone-hacking scandal. 

Richard Bean’s piece has all the chief protagonists on view. Andy Coulson, Rebekah Brooks, David Cameron, Glen Mulcaire and others are all there in barely disguised guises. 

It’s a fast-paced romp through the narrative with bravura performances from Billie Piper as Paige Britain — an amalgam Rebekah Brooks-like figure — Robert Glenister as a foul-mouthed Andy Coulson clone and a brash Dermot Crowley as Paschal O’Leary, a Murdoch-like proprietor from Ireland rather than Australia. 

Bean is a very witty writer who fires off a series of great one-liners and no-one here comes out with their dignity intact. Portrayed as thick, inept and criminally corrupt, the police perhaps come off worst as, along with politicians and the press, they embroil themselves in an iniquitous conspiracy.

The action is played out on a brilliantly realised set, the open-plan newsroom of The Free Press tabloid, divided by huge glass partitions.  

They function as mirrors to the audience as well as projection screens on which lurid tabloid headlines, based on real ones, appear and there are “live” TV newscasts, like an outside commentary on the action. 

Yet despite this surface brilliance, every character is symbolic and two-dimensional, with no complexity or depth. And although we have been royally entertained, the experience feels rather like being forcibly dragged through a pile of stinking sewage. 

We’ve laughed, but what have we learned? Great Britain tells us nothing we don’t already know from the massive media coverage of the phone-hacking affair and Bean chooses to ridicule rather than analyse or examine the wider context of what the whole hacking conspiracy tells us about our society.

He could have done with more of the incisive bite of a Brecht than the lightweight wit of a Wilde. At root, though, is the problem of attempting to satirise what is almost beyond satire. 

What’s also disquieting is that this is a play that should be seen by Sun readers but the auditorium was, I’d bet, packed with Guardian, Mail and Telegraph readers who can afford to laugh about the “dummies” taken in by paedophile-bashing, the sanctimonious “Sarah’s Law” and anti-immigrant hysteria.

Runs until August 23. Box office: 020 7452 3000.