Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Cast: Nick Walker, Hannah Barker.

Who decides what is newsworthy? Who sets the agenda for what the British people see on their television sets and delivered by journalists sometimes more concerned with their own image than what gets reported upon? In the week of the 2015 British General Election, news can often get misrepresented, especially in a media that is driven more and more by the projected image.

As with all news stories that can suddenly happen, a tsunami engulfing a lonely Indian Ocean island, an earthquake somewhere on the planet or even a political uprising perhaps very close to home, news is partially overtaken by news itself and with that in mind, for the Unity Theatre to host a series of shows in the lead up to and the wake of the General Election that deal with what truly matters is a truly remarkable achievement; especially for China Plate and their presentation of Our Main Story Tonight:.

It takes a special kind of play to be written and bought to the stage within 24 hours, a play that was only finished at five in the evening of the day of the performance but summed up the appeal of the television news in an overblown media driven world, a world in which stories of hope are relegated to never being reported upon in favour of the sensational and hyped.

Our Main Story Tonight: takes that idea and pays homage to the likes of Broadcast News and Drop The Dead Donkey and shows what the media is like behind the camera, the tittle tattle of the gossip rating higher in the studio as topic of conversation at times than the ongoing situation in Nepal.

To write a play in 24 hours is one thing, especially for a festival of writing such as U Decide, but to learn that part, to bring it to the audience with the gravitas deserved, that takes great adaption and courage on behalf of the actors and in Nick Walker and Hannah Barker that courage was intensified and played out with the skill of a surgeon after 20 years on the front-line.

The Unity Theatre truly returned to its impressive roots with this particular performance, the avant garde mixing with the radical and the uncompromising. It is a play of great generosity but one also fuelled the activism for change, that as a society we must surely take the opportunity to root out gossip and deliver hard facts instead, not to be a nation willing to watch the banal but one that can truly empathise with the plight of others.

A wonderful play in which to kick off a great idea such as U Decide!

Ian D. Hall