‘Tell them the truth’ says one character in Press. ‘Which one?’ her companion replies.
This play opens with effortlessly confident movie executive David in a television studio puffing up his new film which is almost certain to be nominated for a Goldie award (read ‘Oscar’). Nothing about him is genuine or in any way likeable but we warm to David in Nathaniel Brimmer-Beller’s portrayal as he wriggles painfully when he is given bad news live on television.
Smack Wave Films feel they have climbed the notoriously slippery slope of depicting race on screen and have a sure-fire winner. The historical story of their film is of a group slaves (or ‘enslaved people,’ as they keep correcting themselves) who escape and are protected by a white saviour. It is a moving, heartwarming film about courage and inter-racial solidarity during the most difficult of times. Except that it isn’t. Now that the film might be nominated for a Goldie there is much more attention to its historical source and it is revealed on social media that the real-life saviour of the escapees was actually black, and had previously been enslaved himself. Oh dear. From being the right-on poster children of woke, the producers realise they have committed the ultimate sin of political incorrectness: they have whitewashed a slave story.
Brimmer-Beller, who wrote the script and directed the piece, is brilliant as the spluttering executive who was always in control, now seeing his empire fall.  Kate is his business partner, assuredly played by Rosie Hart as a manipulative woman racing through the possibilities of deception to see which will work. There is superb timing between the couple who rely on each other but would stab each other in the back at the turn of a card.
The tension is concentrated here because the nomination for the Goldies is imminent. If it isn’t nominated, they don’t have to make anything of it or even release it, and the film can be quietly forgotten. If nominated, the storm of social media censure it will unleash will sink the company. They already feel the ‘little digital pitchforks’ of Twitter.
There is only one thing for it: they must sabotage their own production and stop it getting the nomination, and they have half an hour to do it. This edge-of-the-seat drama is played in real time and with no more props than two chairs and two mobile phones.
It is packed with sharp one-liners that satirise Hollywood’s squeamishness about social issues and indifference to reality, with policies literally taken from fortune cookies. If only, they wish, an actor had just gone and MeToo-ed someone, the press release for that is already written up and ready to go. A masterful piece of theatre.
Playwright: Nathaniel Brimmer-Beller
Cast: Nathaniel Brimmer-Beller
Duration: 55 minutes
Until: 5 July 2025