Review: THE STORY, National Theatre
Tracey Scott Wilson's newsroom thriller arrives in the UK for the first time
In an unintentionally timely piece of programming, The Story opens at the National a month or so after Jason Arday’s death. Much like that saga, US playwright Tracey Scott Wilson’s play is concerned with the failure of institutions to protect talented people from minority backgrounds, the urge to cheat one’s way in under a broken system, and the immense personal cost of both these phenomena to reputations and lives.
Black Panther star Letitia Wright plays Yvonne, a young journalist who wants to be “a reporter, not a Black reporter” for a prominent regional US newspaper, and ends up going to alarming lengths to fabricate a lead for the story she thinks will make her name – involving the murder of a wealthy white man in a majority-Black neighbourhood.
Yvonne’s formidable editor Pat (Orange is the New Black’s Lorraine Toussaint), white nepo baby boyfriend Jeff (played with slimy, bell hooks-reading hypocrisy by Wilf Scolding), and fellow Black reporter and rival Neil (a strong, often comic turn from Ashley Thomas) all have stakes in the game too, and varied, often contradictory motives for pursuing news journalism – to publish the truth at all costs, to advocate for a community, or to further one’s own career.
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.
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There is also the question of how relevant this kind of story – a commentary on the media’s ability to twist truths and shape the narrative, first performed in 2003 – is in 2026, when social media has become many people’s primary way of getting news. Many of the ethical conundrums faced by the reporters are as thorny now as ever, but social media is an elephant in the room, one that would have heightened the consequences of a story like this considerably. Scenes involving reporters thrusting microphones in a suspect’s face feel hopelessly dated.
The Story’s weaknesses are compounded by director Clint Dyer’s maximalist approach. Clips of news anchors responding to the case constantly play on screen, and there are frequent scenes where multiple conversations happen at once and overlap with one another, alongside pulsating, frantic lighting cues. There may be some intended commentary here about how overwhelming constant news coverage can be, but having so much going on at once confuses the narrative, rather than enhancing it.
Instead, Dyer is a more effective director when he lets his actors work independently, and showcase the subtler machinations of the news business. One memorable scene involves Yvonne and Neil both manipulating each other into taking their preferred angle on a story over a quasi-romantic dinner. More often, though, the exact sticking points of the various ethical conflict these journalists face are lost in the weeds of overdirection.
It is exciting to see the National plucking a work from obscurity like this – the production was apparently based on a chance encounter between Wilson and Dyer two decades ago. But this revival has done little to remedy The Story’s flaws.
The Story plays at The National Theatre until 24 October
Photo credits: Feruza Afewerki
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