The Story – National Theatre, Olivier Theatre

2.5/5 stars

Yesterday we headed to the National Theatre to see The Story, a much-anticipated production starring Letitia Wright, probably best known to many audiences for playing Shuri in Black Panther.

Written by American playwright Tracey Scott Wilson and directed by National Theatre Associate Artist Clint Dyer, The Story is advertised as a newsroom thriller examining race, ambition, journalistic ethics and, ultimately, the difference between the truth and the version of the truth that makes the best story.

And honestly, I really wanted to love this.

There are some genuinely excellent elements to the production, and technically there are moments when it is incredibly clever. Unfortunately, as a complete piece of theatre, it just didn’t quite come together for me.

So, what’s it all about?

Letitia Wright plays Yvonne, an ambitious young Black journalist who just started working within a newspaper where she is expected to concentrate largely on positive stories from the Black community. However she has ambitions to progress as quickly as possible to the newsdesk.

When a white teacher is murdered in a predominantly Black neighbourhood, his wife identifies the attacker as a Black man. Yvonne becomes convinced that there is a bigger story to uncover and, despite resistance from her editor Pat, played by Lorraine Toussaint, she begins investigating.

Then she gets what appears to be an extraordinary break when a young woman comes forward claiming to have been involved in the shooting.

And that’s where I’m going to stop, because saying much more would potentially spoil the story.

Alongside Wright and Toussaint, the principal cast includes Aliyah Odoffin as Latisha, Ashley Thomas as Neil and Wilf Scolding as Jeff, with Antonia Bernath and Josh Goulding playing Jessica and Tim Dunn. It’s a strong company.

Some of my favourite elements actually came from Clint Dyer’s direction and the technical production. There is a particularly clever use of overlapping dialogue. At various points, several characters speak simultaneously, sometimes in sync and sometimes at deliberately different levels, creating something resembling multiple television channels or newsroom conversations happening at once. It gives the production a sense of noise, pressure and information overload without simply having people running around the stage pretending to look busy. I thought that was really effective.

I would, however, be interested to know how these sections translate for audience members using hearing enhancement or other assisted-listening systems, because the deliberate layering of voices is such an important part of the effect.

Paul Anderson’s lighting design is also excellent and does a huge amount of work in creating atmosphere and directing your attention around the enormous Olivier stage.

Anna Fleischle’s set is much simpler. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but for me it never added much to the storytelling. The Olivier is an enormous space and I’ve seen productions where the set almost becomes another character; equally, I’ve seen sets deliberately fade into the background and allow the performances to shine.

Here, it seemed caught somewhere between the two. Like the play itself, I never really understood what it was trying to accomplish.

And unfortunately, that sense of uncertainty extended beyond the set.

Honestly I really struggled with The Story.

This should have been exactly my kind of play.

There are so many interesting storylines and genuinely thought-provoking questions that The Story raises but, for me, never explores deeply enough.

Who gets to decide what the truth is? At what point should a journalist be held accountable for the consequences of their reporting? When does shaping a narrative cross the line into fabrication, and what happens when the pursuit of a powerful story becomes more important than the truth itself?

There was also another potentially fascinating theme sitting underneath all of this: what happens when someone who wants to champion a marginalised community ultimately causes further harm to the very people they believe they are representing?

That was actually my biggest takeaway from the play.

Yvonne is a young journalist who appears determined to tell stories that establish herself professionally and rather than uncovering a truth that might genuinely serve the community she is reporting on, her actions ultimately contribute to a false narrative that fuels division, suspicion and further hostility within that community, ultimately undermining much of what Pat, Lorraine Toussaint’s character, had worked so hard to establish.

That is an incredibly powerful, complex and uncomfortable idea.

The problem is that I never felt the play explored it enough.

I came away unsure what Tracey Scott Wilson ultimately wanted us to question. Was this about journalistic integrity? Ambition? Racial stereotyping? The pressure placed on Black journalists to represent their communities? The danger of allowing our own beliefs and ambitions to influence the truth? Or the consequences of creating a narrative because it fits the story we want to tell?

It could absolutely be about all of those things — great theatre doesn’t have to give us a single neat answer — but it does need to give us enough to wrestle with.

For me, The Story didn’t.

Rather than feeling deliberately ambiguous, it felt muddled. I wasn’t left debating what the play meant; I was left wondering what it had been trying to say in the first place.

And despite being described as a thriller, I never felt particularly thrilled.

There wasn’t enough tension to put me on the edge of my seat, and I didn’t become emotionally invested enough in the characters to desperately care about what happened to them.

I’ve left productions such as Man and Boy and Pride still thinking about what I’d witnessed hours later. They gave me something to chew over — an idea, a perspective or an uncomfortable question that followed me for days.

I didn’t get that from The Story.

Race, truth, prejudice, representation, journalistic responsibility and the power of the media to influence how we see one another are enormous subjects. A play tackling them should leave me challenged, uncomfortable, angry, inspired — perhaps even arguing about it on the way home.

Instead, I left feeling strangely indifferent.

And I suspect that if somebody asks me in a year’s time what I thought of The Story, I may struggle to remember much about the production at all.

With themes this powerful, that really shouldn’t be my takeaway — and perhaps that’s why I found The Story so disappointing.

I went in desperately wanting to love it; I came out wishing it had given me more to think about.

♿ Accessibility at the Olivier Theatre

Now let’s talk about access, because unfortunately this is an area where I think the National Theatre really does need to do better.

If you’ve listened to the podcast or read the website before, you’ll know I’ve had issues with wheelchair access at the National Theatre — not necessarily because you can’t access the building, but because the experience once you’re inside isn’t always as good as I believe it should be.

Getting to the Olivier itself is relatively straightforward. Once inside the National Theatre, you can use the lifts to reach level 2, and there is an Access Desk offering information and assistance. For this performance, accessible provision included options such as hearing assistance and large-print information.

Our wheelchair spaces were towards the rear of the Olivier stalls, in Row R. The conventional seats surrounding these spaces benefit from the rake of the auditorium: as the rows go backwards, the seats become higher, improving the audience’s sightlines over the people in front.

But the wheelchair space isn’t raised in the same way.

And that creates an obvious problem.

The person sitting in front of you is directly in your sightline.

As an ambulant or able bodied audience member, the architecture of the auditorium has been designed to give you a reasonable view over the person in front. As a wheelchair user, you’re positioned on a flat section without that same elevation.

Surely the goal should be for the wheelchair user’s sightline to be comparable to that of the audience members sitting alongside them.

At the moment, it isn’t.

In my particular space, there also wasn’t enough room to position my wheelchair between the heads of the people in front. To get a reasonable view of the stage, I had to move at least half of my wheelchair into the aisle.

That’s not a particularly satisfactory solution — either for me or potentially from an evacuation and safety perspective.

And there appear to be relatively simple options worth exploring.

A temporary raised wheelchair platform with appropriate ramped access and edge protection could potentially improve the sightline considerably. Other theatres have used variations of raised wheelchair platforms successfully.

Alternatively, could the seat immediately in front of certain wheelchair positions be removable? When the wheelchair space is occupied, that seat could be taken out; when it isn’t required, it could remain part of the normal seating configuration. Simply not selling the seat isn't sufficent in my opinion as I am sure the tempatiopn of an empty seat would prove too much!

I’m not pretending to be a theatre architect, and there may well be technical or safety considerations I’m unaware of.

But the current situation doesn’t feel like the best solution either.

And that’s important because we’re talking about the National Theatre — arguably the flagship institution of British theatre.

Accessibility shouldn’t simply mean being able to physically enter the auditorium. It should mean being able to experience the production on genuinely comparable terms.

I also think the National could look at the wider experience of navigating such a large and busy building. I appreciate that staffing costs have increased enormously and the theatre has faced significant financial pressures, but perhaps a volunteer access-host scheme could be explored. Organisations such as Shakespeare’s Globe have demonstrated how effective and valuable having people available to guide and assist visitors can be.

Sometimes relatively small changes can make an enormous difference to somebody’s experience.

I’ve contacted the National Theatre directly about the Olivier wheelchair sightlines and included photographs showing the problem.

I’ll let you know what they say in my next Olivier Theatre review.