Savaging the "Foundry of Lies" Pravda

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Mention the notion of a play about newspapering, and audiences tend to think of characters like those so affectionately evoked in The Front Page: raffish, even loutish, prone to sensationalism and cheap sentiment, but also truthful, keenly professional and dedicated to exposing wrongdoing in high places. Reporters have delighted in seeing themselves depicted as figures of quixotic integrity in plays ranging from the Broadway musical Woman of the Year to Tom Stoppard's rueful tragicomedy Night and Day. But the current wave of antipress feeling in the U.S. may have spread to Britain as well. Audiences at London's National Theater, which in 1972 staged an acclaimed revival of The Front Page, are cheering now for Pravda, a coruscating, comic attack on Fleet Street that portrays reporters as timid, trivial and truckling and that describes a newspaper as "the foundry of lies." (The ironic title is Russian for "truth" and also the name of the Soviet Communist Party newspaper.)

Unlike American attacks on the press, which tend to come from the right and assail reporters as too skeptical toward government, Pravda lambastes London's journalists from the left, as tame toadies of deceitful politicians. The handful of reporters in the play who show glimmers of decency are hounded out of the trade or nullified by their editors or derailed by their own greed ^ and ambition. In the climax of the plot, the forces of virtue, somewhat tarnished themselves, are gulled into printing a libel that undoes their chances of stopping an evil publisher. Like too many journalists, these dubious heroes simply believe what people tell them and thus are easily misled.

The malign publisher, Lambert Le Roux, is the captivating antihero of the piece. By cunning, he takes over both a populist tabloid and a stately, ultraupperbrow daily. The character has been assumed by many people in Britain to be a burlesque of Australian Press Lord Rupert Murdoch, owner of the Sun and Times of London, as well as the New York Post, Boston Herald and Chicago Sun-Times. There are conspicuous differences: Le Roux is a South African, not an Australian, and he lives in the Surrey countryside, not New York City.

Whatever real-world parallels the playwrights may have had in mind for this shrewd, calculatedly savage entrepreneur, Le Roux has a life of his own, and on the grand scale. In Anthony Hopkins' brilliant, buoyant realization, he is a comic creation as monstrously beguiling as Tartuffe. He shares with Moliere's sham holy man the gift of ever renewed plausibility. Time and again, just as the audience is ready to withdraw its sympathy in disgust, Le Roux exposes the hypocrisies of opponents so tellingly that he becomes persuasive anew. When outraged employees confront him, his retort is blunt and seemingly unanswerable: If an unfettered press is crucial to a free society, then why have Fleet Street journalists squandered their energies on look-alike rags compounded of crime, cleavage, gossip about royalty and page upon page of sports?

In that moment, it becomes clear that Pravda is not merely lamenting the newspapers that are but pining for newspapers that might be. The play is not foremost a preachment, however, but a superb high-energy entertainment, with a cast of 33, lavishly detailed sets, throbbing music and an urgent, propulsive style set by Co-Author Hare, who directed. It recalls the morally assertive best of warmhearted Broadway satires like The Solid Gold Cadillac in every regard save one: Pravda does not and, given its bitter convictions, could not have a happy ending.