Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Chaotic times call for clear focus. Good Night, and Good Luck grasps this in dramatising Edward R Murrow’s investigation of Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee witch-hunts in the 1950s. George Clooney plays the newscaster as a noble grey avatar of ethics and decency in this close stage reworking of the 2005 film of the same name that he directed and co-wrote with Grant Heslov.David Cromer’s bracingly timely production at New York’s Winter Garden Theatre in one sense resembles a revival, bringing to the era of Trump and Musk a message originally keyed to George W Bush and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Murrow’s incisive television monologues against McCarthy’s abuses have always been inspiring. But now, in a month when tens of thousands of Americans have taken to the streets, they have acquired flashing-siren immediacy. This is a play about the need for an entire population to maintain backbone in the face of power, and Clooney’s steely performance drives this home.Scott Pask’s detailed mock-up of the CBS offices whirrs with the busy urgency of broadcast journalism. All of this resolves into fixed attention whenever Murrow’s See It Now goes on air, Clooney facing the camera on one side of the stage while a giant screen lowers to show his live-feed close-up. Reckonings unfold in assorted spaces on the shifting stage: an editorial room, an executive’s office, a break area. High up on a raised platform, a singer (Georgia Heers) croon numbers with eerily resonant titles such as “I’ve Got My Eyes On You”.The newsroom cast — including Ilana Glazer as a staffer secretly married to a colleague — provides bustle and the sense of a larger community at stake. But the heart of the drama is Murrow versus McCarthy. In the freefall of 2025, Murrow’s 1950s show provides a model of independence. He defends an Air Force lieutenant attacked by a smear campaign, and dissects McCarthy’s tactics using “the junior senator’s” own words (shown in clips). The risks of speaking out are vividly shown in pressure from CBS management to present both sides of each issue, and in advertisers pulling out.Clooney (replacing the film’s David Strathairn) shrewdly dials down his star wattage, playing Murrow as an almost undertakerly figure with an unerring steadiness. But he loosens up when he is with his producer Fred Friendly (a jovial and conspiratorial Glenn Fleshler) or ill-fated fellow newscaster Don Hollenbeck (Clark Gregg). Gregg brings a tender fragility to the bewilderment of their political moment — “I wake up in the morning and I don’t recognise anything” — while McCarthy plays his unctuous self in archive footage (as does Liberace in one of the amusingly canned celebrity interviews Murrow had to conduct).The sense of direct address to the audience is reinforced by bracketing scenes of Murrow at a podium delivering his famous 1958 speech to the Radio-Television News Directors Association. Its warnings are pointedly pertinent to today — the media are “being used to distract, delude, amuse and insulate us” — in a production that repeatedly elicits say-amen applause from the audience. Metatexts also hover: Clooney entering the US political fray last summer by questioning President Biden’s fitness to govern; McCarthy shown in clips with lawyer Roy Cohn, later a mentor to Donald Trump.Above all, Murrow, who broadcast from London during the Blitz, doesn’t flinch. It’s as if he immediately recognises what HUAC target Lillian Hellman called “the fierce, sweeping, violent nonsense-tragedies that break out in America from time to time.” His trademark sign-off — “Good night, and good luck” — remains a sobering call to action in dark times.★★★★☆To June 8, goodnightgoodluckbroadway.com
