Travelling Light

Nicholas Wright's new play is a love letter to the early days of the silent movie. One of the many fragments of history illuminated in the flickering light of Nicholas Hytner's skilful staging is the less-than-familiar movement of emigrants like Wright's protagonist Motl, who left restrictive village life back in the Jewish shtetl in Eastern European, smoothed out their glottal names and pursued a silver dream in early Hollywood.

'Travelling Light' sketches one such story with agreeable humour and subtlety. But despite its initial promise, it lacks depth and warmth. It travels lifetimes and continents too lightly to be theatre's answer to 'Cinema Paradiso'.

Wright's nice eye for historical detail and unfailing sympathy for his characters has made him a wonderfully rewarding writer of bio-dramas. Here, at a meta-fictional tangent to history, his characters are less interesting than their context: they lack a vital spark of life.

Young Motl is coolly portrayed by Damien Molony as a talented boy who returns home to his village after his father's death to inherit a cine camera, only to be strongarmed by rich local timber merchant Jacob Bindel (Antony Sher) into making a film about the shtetl he is desperate to escape. But Motl is problematically unsympathetic: his connections to others are indirect and he betrays everyone who helps him on his way.

Molony captures the excitement of the early movies but Motl is untouched by warmth despite sentimental flashback narration from his middle-aged self (Paul Jesson), a successful American film maker. If only his clever, resourceful assistant Anna (Lauren O'Neil) had been the hero of the play instead of its muse.

Sher's Bindel verges on bearded stereotype but has a hearty directness and frustrated passion which contrasts hugely and sometimes oddly with the playfulness of this particular frame. Authenticity is in quote marks everywhere: even Bob Crowley's lovely bleached wood design for Motl's village opens up to reveal itself as a Hollywood stage set.

Broad village comedy forms much of the drama, as it is filmed and increasingly staged by young Motl then sent flickering poignantly over the roofs of the set by Hytner. It may once have been a memory, but it's now a fiction. After several further removes I left wondering whether the bewildering ending, in which Motl's past catches up with him, was a dream, a schmaltzy movie or a knowing joke.