'Travelling Light' NT Live screening reviewed in The National Post by Robert Cushman

Damien Molony is gently charming as the young pioneer of spectacle who starts with home movies and finds himself telling stories about the girl he loves in the medium he loves

(Posting for interest and the note worthy mention of Damien Molony as 'gently charming' in his role as Motl in Travelling Light, a piece from the National Post on the 'Golden Age' of the National Theatre, National Theatre Live, the work of Nicholas Hytner, Travelling Light and other productions.)

"Back at the South Bank base, I saw two more Hytner productions, both new plays with Russian settings. The less substantial of the two, in the Lyttlelton, was Travelling Light, by Nicholas Wright, whose play about Van Gogh, Vincent in Brixton, is overdue for discovery here. The new one is concerned with the birth of film, hence the too-clever title, and is mostly set in a shtetl; it’s a surprise to enter a theatre expecting to encounter old Hollywood and to find yourself looking at what might be the set for Fiddler on the Roof. It’s fact the main action is framed by Hollywood scenes; an expatriate director is shooting a movie about how he got his start back in the old country, and there’s magic in the way in which one period and location melt into another.

Damien Molony is gently charming as the young pioneer of spectacle who starts with home movies and finds himself telling stories about the girl he loves in the medium he loves; Antony Sher is more strenuously enjoyable as the village entrepreneur who raises money from the community to finance the picture, and in the process invents both the focus group and the interfering producer. The resolution involves some outrageous coincidences, which I was perfectly happy to accept; in fact I found the whole thing beguiling, if hardly major."