During a six-week rehearsal period, playwright Anthony Nielson and his actors created and developed Unreachable from scratch. There was no script. They ended up with a scrappy satire on the movie industry which is much inferior to Charles Wood’s Veterans, a spoof on the making of Tony Richardson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade which was seen many years ago at the Royal Court and starred John Gielgud (sending himself up) and the then-unknown Bob Hoskins as an electrician.
An award-winning film director is attempting to shoot an apocalyptic SF epic but the production is delayed by his obsessive quest for a mystical perfect light. He has a big ego and is liable to scrap the film and bankrupt the backers. Matt Smith exercises all his charm. Amanda Drew plays his down-to-earth producer and Richard Pryos his ambitious cameraman.
The production begins with a serious bit of acting by Tamara Lawrence who plays a mother who thinks she is going to be killed by rebels and kills her baby only to find she is not killed. The production is never that serious again
Jonjo O’Neill, cast as a European actor, nicknamed The Brute, hijacks the production and upstages everybody with his often hilarious performance. Even O’Neill cannot keep a straight face when he is outrageously lying and claiming what a nice chap he really is and not a brute at all.
If you wanted some really exciting drama during the last couple of weeks, you didn’t need to go to the theatre. You could stay at home and watch the news on television and read the newspapers. There was nothing comparable dramatically on the London stage, at least not since the Renaissance, to the backstabbing which was going on in the political parties.