Tracey Scott Wilson’s newsroom drama ‘The Story’ being put on in the Olivier Theatre on paper sounds exceptional, a play with an enticing, thrilling and at times labyrinthine plot that keeps the audience on the edge of their seats throughout, a poignant message that still remains important to modern audiences and an a-list cast of actors as well as a superb director. However for me I came out of the theatre feeling as though when all of these many elements combined, it just became a little bit too much.
The plot of the story follows a group of 4 journalists rushing to get to the centre of a story about a white schoolteacher murdered infront of his wife in a predominately black neighbourhood in America after she insists to the police that it was a black man. We follow Yvonne, a young black journalist, placed to work in a small section of a major newspaper where she grows frustrated by the small scope of stories she is allowed to cover. She is encouraged to reduce her ambitions by her elder supervisor Pat but decides to pursue the phenomenal case of the white schoolteacher regardless. However the question is how far will Yvonne go to get that story?
The thing is, I feel Wilson never overly answers that question and she never really answers the important questions of the plot making the play feel like a road full of pot holes. Wilson, maybe on purpose maybe not, writes the 4 main characters to be rather unlikeable (Yvonne, Neil, Jeff and Pat) which therefore means I lacked a lot of care for what was actually happening. The character development feels limited and we ask ourselves a lot of questions about the relationships we are seeing. I feel the play is a little to over-ambitious in the way it is written substituting character plots for a tonne of sensational plot twists in the second act.
Clint Dyer’s direction shines especially in the second act as we go into a crazy fast paces thriller with intense intercut dialogue and loud swelling music to reach our final climax. However in the first act it feels a bit messy and all over the place, perhaps due to Wilson’s choice to intercut character dialogue. For example in one scene we would hear 2 accounts of the same conversation with each character explaining their recollection, but this means there was a lot of mistakes. Actors talking over each other, lots of hesitation and the most fluffing of lines I have seen in a National production. As an actor myself I must applaud all the actors for even giving this a go as I would certainly struggle to switch in and out of 2 conversations with very different people. Yvonne goes from talking to her boss to her husband in the space of half a second and , of course, her posture will be very different in both circumstances. This is a test of actor stamina but it just leaves room for a lot of error which actually distracted me from the plot and took me out of the action at times. As I said it is not a critique of the actors as this is very tough, more of the way it is written making it more of an acting challenge than a piece of theatre that is easy to put on.
The Olivier stage is a humongous space, that has seen ginormous set pieces engulf the theatre such as 2013s pirate ship in Treasure Island or the stone pillars of Lyndsey Turner’s Coriolanus. Sometimes for some productions, I feel they struggle to effectively utilise this space and this was certainly the case for The Story. Scenes feel very stretched on the stage, with small desks and small screens to show news reports that actually make some parts of the story feel very anti-climactic. The part I love is that in the final moments of the play when the consequences of the news story come out and young people riot, the stage opens like a book showing cars getting smashed and teenagers being arrested. It was very effective in that moment however I wish the stage was a bit smaller to make the action closer together and those private scenes feel a little more intimate.
I have done my critique on what makes this production slightly disappointing, but now lets get on to what I love which is my praise!
I adored the second act, it was only an hour but all the plot twists and the intriguing details within it were absolutely excellent. Wilson’s writing abandons the intercut dialogue and we are now just in fast-paced scene changes and intense scene transitions that slowly reveal more and more the ever shifting plot and crazy final resolution. I also think the acting was all exceptional in the second act as well, especially from the main cast who I will talk about next. The National billed this a ‘thriller’ and I could feel my heart rate raising as we reached the end of the play, it was so exciting and I could not have predicted how it ended.
The acting in this play is really good, with the standout for me being Leticia Wright as Yvonne. She is a character I think is meant to be disliked from the start, she appears a little over ambitious and untrustworthy right from the start and Wright plays this to perfection. We see her ignore all advice from her loved ones and supervisors as she believes what she is doing is right and I thought that Wright shone towards the end of the play in portraying her anger and pure hunger for her career. She is complimented well by Lorraine Toussaint as Pat who tries to hold her back but in the end ends up being her main accomplice in her control of the coverage of the murder case. Toussaint’s monologue about the civil rights marches was devestating and the raw emotion she displayed was certainly caught by me being in the second row of the auditorium. I like Ashley Thomas as Neil, a charismatic journalist who attempts to befriend Yvonne but is truly looking out for himself. Thomas plays Neil as someone who looks friendly but when you get close you can smell and sense their pure arrogance and greed. Additionally two shoutouts to Will Scolding as Yvonne’s boyfriend Jeff and Antonia Bernath as the wife of the murdered schoolteacher who play pivotal roles within the plot.
MY VERDICT:
It makes me sad to only give this 3 stars as the composition of the second act was excellent but there were just too many things I thought could have been done better within this production. These range from the way that it was written, to certain elements of the direction and certainly the choice to leave the set feeling very empty and sparse in multiple moments of the play as they have so much space to work with. However this play does cover a lot of important issues, certainly surrounding fake news and journalists invading privacy as well as journalistic integrity, and its themes on racism and America are very interesting to listen to. It helps that it is a thrilling story that you will enjoy regardless on how you feel about the intricacies of the production.
Remember when I go to the theatre I look for faults and mistakes but if I was a casual theatre goer this would entertain me a lot and therefore I would recommend! Just ignore some of the mistakes in the first act and a word of warning if your in the front 2 rows of the stalls your neck may hurt from having to look from one side of the stage to the other in quick succession, mine certainly did!!
The Story plays at the Olivier Theatre in London until 24th October 2026
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