Stage-to-screen review: Good Night, and Good Luck

Former Golden Girls guest star George Clooney made his Broadway debut last year in Good Night, and Good Luck, an adaptation of one of his own films from twenty years earlier. One performance was broadcast live on CNN of all places, and that recording has now been added with very little fanfare to Netflix in the UK - possibly to make sure everyone forgets about Jay Kelly a little bit quicker. For David Cromer's production Clooney and Grant Heslov adapt their own script, with Clooney moving up to the lead role of Edward R. Murrow, the 1950s CBS news reporter whose team took on the, at the time seemingly all-powerful, Senator Joseph McCarthy. McCarthy's HUAC witchhunts, most famous on stage as the inspiration for The Crucible, used a panic they themselves had largely created about Communist spies hiding in America, to build a culture of fear where McCarthy was the ultimate arbiter of what was true and who was loyal.

For Murrow and his team, among the other civil liberties being eroded, perhaps the most offensive aspect of this was the fact that it created a population afraid to question or investigate anything outside of their immediate beliefs and what they were told - something that goes against everything that defines them as investigative journalists.

I don't remember seeing the 2005 film - in which Clooney played Murrow's producer Fred Friendly, here played by Glenn Fleshler - and this didn't ring any bells so I guess I never caught it, but I enjoyed the way Clooney and Heslov's story breaks down how the production team approached the taboo subject, ultimately tackling McCarthy by doing a half-hour special that damned him almost entirely by repeating his own words back. Particularly interesting is the way that they start his downfall by letting him play exactly by his own rulebook: When given the right to respond, McCarthy delivers the inevitable half-hour denunciation of his accusor as a Communist, leading the newsmen to be able to point out that, as he didn't use his right-of-reply to dispute any of the claims made against him, he must be acknowledging them to be true.

The play takes place almost entirely among people who agree with Murrow's crusade - even corporate boss William F. Paley (Paul Gross) avoids becoming a stereotypical antagonist as he worries about the channel losing sponsors - but still manages to build much of its tension out of the consequences that could come for any of them: Don Hollenbeck (Clark Gregg) and Palmer Williams (Fran Kranz) have things in their pasts they know can be used against them, but there's also a lighter, internal sense of secrets being kept as married couple Shirley (Ilana Glazer) and Joe Wershba (Carter Hudson) pretend not to be in a relationship because of the studio's strict rules against nepotism.

Cromer's production intersperses the scenes with jazz classics, giving us something warmer among all the Cold War paranoia, although the little moments framing this as an overworked group of sessions musicians in a neighbouring studio feels like unnecessarily justifying their presence. But I did like how the fact that the show opens with one such number means the inevitable entrance applause for Clooney gets lost among that for Georgia Heers' performance*.

Outside of a few wide shots of Scott Pask's expansive set, Micah Bickham's filmed version is very much based on close-ups so it's hard to get the sense of what it would be like to watch this in the theatre; the story, set mainly in the studio and offices, is intimate enough that it feels a good match to the stage, but the production is heavily dependent on archive footage and the actors speaking into camera, so it did make me wonder if this was one of those shows that ends up prioritising what's on the screens and leaving the live audience slightly alienated.

It's an enjoyable 90 minutes as a filmed version though, and the use of archives of McCarthy does bring the interesting revelation of what an uncharismatic, slurred way of speaking he had, which if anything makes him even more sinister as the dull figure relentlessly steamrolling over anyone with the audacity to have an opinion. The matter-of-fact way the characters deal with the way their lives could be ruined completely by pursuing this story is also nicely understated, although this is undermined a fair bit by the heavy-handed nods to the story's present-day relevance.

Good Night, and Good Luck by George Clooney and Grant Heslov is available to watch on Netflix in the UK.

Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes.

Photo credit: Emilio Madrid.

*my understanding is that Broadway creatives themselves hate the tradition of whooping and cheering when someone first arrives because it limits how they can introduce a character to the stage, although I'm sure there's plenty of actors who enjoy getting an ovation just for remembering to show up