Borat with a beard

Last November I suggested that Nicholas Hytner had gone mad. Now he confirms the diagnosis with a new satire by Nicholas Wright, Travelling Light, which is the most embarrassing and mindless blunder I’ve ever seen on a subsidised stage. Hytner’s November crime was to mount a retro sitcom about Stalin’s terror. Now he baits the Russians again with a sketch-show set among the Tsarist peasantry.

Wright’s play, which Hytner directs, asks what might have happened if a crew of Jewish bumpkins had made a movie in 1900 using an early hand-cranked camera. We meet Motl Mendl, a jabbering numbskull armed with some film gear. He shoots five minutes of dreary footage in his shtetl and exhibits the results to his neighbours. They savage the film with glee and then, by magic, they collectively brainstorm a gripping weepie about a knocked-up skivvy and the baby she abandons in an orphanage.