NT Live: Travelling Light

The National Theatre's Travelling Light couldn’t be better timed with The Artist’s awards-season smash success. Like The Artist, it’s another love letter to early moviemaking.

Nicholas Wright’s play is set in a shtetl in Eastern Europe where a young man, Motl Mendl, finds his dead father’s Lumiere Brothers Cinematographe and starts filming (and screening) moving pictures around the village. We follow as Motl experiences cinema as a completely new artform: there are many laughs as he figures out filming, editing, and suffers through nitpicky test screenings, casting couches and creative differences. We also meet Motl as an older man, in 1930's Hollywood where he’s a mogul rechristened Maurice Montgomery (the play highlights how Jewish heritage made its stamp on the early days of Hollywood).

Silent films (new, but impressively vintage-looking) projected on set as part of the production bring that love of cinema to the forefront of the show.

The star attraction is Antony Sher as the overbearing producer, playing alongside relative newcomer Damien Molony in an energetic double performance as Motl and a Hollywood actor.

National director Nicholas Hytner (The History Boys) directs.

This is a live broadcast.

Tickets are £15 / £10 to CineCard holders.