Review Roundup: Letitia Wright and Lorraine Toussaint in THE STORY

There’s the truth and then there’s the story.

When a white teacher is killed in a black neighbourhood, four journalists race to get the headline – at any cost. But when shocking new evidence pulls them into the dark heart of the case, they are each forced to confront what they’re prepared to risk to tell their version of the truth.

Gripping and adrenaline-fuelled, Tracey Scott Wilson’s seminal newsroom thriller is directed by Clint Dyer (Death of England) with a cast including BAFTA Award-winner Letitia Wright (Black Panther), Ashley Thomas (MOBO Award-winner, Bashy), Lorraine Toussaint (Orange is the New Black), and Wilf Scolding (Cabaret).

What did the critics think?

The Story plays at The National Theatre until 24 October

Photo credits: Feruza Afewerki

Clementine Scott, BroadwayWorld: This is a promising premise, but the play, despite updates to the script for this revival, falls strangely flat. The two ambitious female characters articulate two opposite responses to racism and misogyny in their profession, but in practice, they often fall into Devil Wears Prada-esque stereotypes of the mentor and protege, never dropping the facade they wear at work. In one of several odd pacing choices in this script, crucial elements of their personal histories are withheld until the eleventh hour, so that when we finally start to understand these characters, we have barely any time left with them.

Arifa Akbar, The Guardian: The themes to Wilson’s 2003 play could not be more apposite today, particularly in relation to the barrage of press coverage in the lead up to the death of Black academic, Jason Arday. Director Clint Dyer’s production has great forward momentum and kinetic pace, with a slick performance from Wright as a tough cookie with no cracks in her armour. It is highly theatrical with fast cuts between scenes and a doubling of action so you see dual scenarios playing out at once, especially in the thrillingly adrenalised first half, although it is so fast and complex at times that you lose the thread.

Clive Davis, The Times: Orange is the New Black star Lorraine Toussaint gives a weighty performance as Pat. Wilson is brave enough to highlight the class divide which ensures that middle-class black Americans often know as little about ghetto life as their white neighbours. Yet a convoluted storyline flits from one improbable twist to another. Themes pile up, bullet point-style.

Nick Curtis, The Standard: A cracking melodrama about race and the media in America, Tracey Scott Wilson’s 2003 play has the pace and punch of a superior streaming drama, and twists into intriguing directions. Clint Dyer’s production features bracing, full-throated performances from the British Black Panther star Letitia Wright and US stage and screen veteran Lorraine Toussaint. It’s funny and provocative and goes places a British play might not.

Dominic Cavendish, The Telegraph: The sense that we’re in a world of smoke and mirrors is beguiling and intellectually pointed; what falls by the wayside, though, is the detail that would flesh out the characters and their milieu. After some droll, loaded exchanges, in which Yvonne’s battle-hardened superior Pat (an imposing Lorraine Toussaint) fills her in on the paper’s history (“a pro-slavery rag”) – albeit she’s had prior steers from her lordly white boyfriend, who is high up there – the narrative tricksiness takes up a lot of the script.

Andrzej Lukowski, Time Out: Wilson’s play is unabashedly populist, bordering on trashy at times, and while there may be some real-life precedent for Pat separately commissioning both Yvonne and Neil to get to the bottom of the gang story – so they are overtly in competition – it does feel like a clunking plot device to up the excitement. And it works: Clint Dyer’s production is totally gripping, especially in the first half as the dialogue rapidly intercuts between the two rival journalists bitching about each other. Yes, it has the air of a well-made Channel 5 true-crime drama. But not all theatre need to be highbrow all the time, plus it makes a lot of incisive points about the fragility of the African-American community, especially as Pam’s hardassed facade melts (or at least, becomes more explicable).

Dave Fargnoli, The Stage: Following a team of journalists who descend on an underprivileged US neighbourhood in the wake of a shocking murder, this twisty, thought-provoking thriller grapples with themes of race, loyalty and journalistic integrity. There are big, compelling ideas here, but Tracey Scott Wilson’s script never quite gels into the shattering thriller the premise promises, taking a little too long to develop its characters and expound its valid points about the truth-distorting effects of systemic racism and ruthless personal ambition.

Stuart King, London Box Office: Scenes loop back and forth so often in an attempt to be vibrant and engaging, that they forget to be coherent, which in its current format is the production’s major weakness. However, THE STORY has undoubted merit when it ceases in its attempts to be shocking and instead focuses on the real impact of the media’s forensic depiction of stereotypes. A pity then, that a play largely set within the tainted and jaded world of newspaper journalism, is overwhelmed by imagery of newsrooms and live-from-the-scene, mic-holding, beige-mac-wearing, cliché-riddled hyperbole-touting, US TV reporters (massive yuck!)

Average Rating: 60.0%