Hall Lee - Network

I have long wanted to bring Paddy Chayefskys drama Network to the stage. I remember being thrilled when I first saw the film in the early 1990s in New York. I was baffled why it wasnt as well known in Britain as it is in the States, where it has a cult status. The writing is brilliant and coruscating. The image of a man losing it, and that anger being absorbed and manipulated by the capitalist machine seems an abiding fable. Watching the movie again about ten years ago I realised that Chayefskys analysis of seventies TV could equally apply to the internet. His understanding that what you see isnt necessarily what you are getting seemed amazingly prescient. So I made my first bid to try to see if the stage rights were available. I was initially thwarted by the complex maze which always entangles anything that was first written as a movie, but was amazed to get a call from producers who did eventually manage to unpick everything. They had no idea of my existing interest but I gratefully grabbed the opportunity.

I was very keen to ensure that Paddys vision was as unsullied as I could make it. Almost every word in the adaptation is actually Paddys. I was given access to his notebooks and papers which are housed in the New York Public Library and I pieced together various insights he had about the script retrospectively. If you watch the interviews with him just after the film came out you sense a man who is still struggling to get a handle on the new world order he is drawing on screen. Its like hes almost unwittingly stumbled upon something and is trying to keep up with his own invention. Ive tried to include these thoughts and his passionate articulations about what the film is about in an act I like to think of as keyhole surgery. Hopefully my interventions are invisible to the untrained eye.

What I had not bargained for when I took on the adaptation was how prescient it would be about our own Age of Anger. As a fable about how the media and corporate interests can exploit the very discontent they cause, it feels current and chilling. Chayefskys satire has become almost documentary realism. The only element which seemed stuck in the seventies was the depiction of the terrorists as cynical media whores. Both Ivo and I felt that terrorisms relationship to the media is now very different from those salad days when it might have been acceptable to poke fun at the supposed radical chic of the Black Power movement. I think we all feel terrorism is difficult to laugh at and not something we can so easily laugh off any more. But other than those cheap jibes at Stokely Carmichael this is unadulterated Chayefsky replete with some of the best dramatic writing and brilliant invective of the last fifty years. I think hes one of the great American dramatists and would urge anyone to track down The Hospital or Marty or indeed any of his other plays or screenplays if you want to see a master at their game.

Thanks to Dan Chayefsky and Patrick Myles for allowing me to work on this, and Rufus Norris and the extraordinary Ivo van Hove for bringing it to the stage with such care, flair and consideration.

Lee Hall, October 2017