Travelling Light (NHB Modern Plays) - Softcover

'a love-letter to the movies and an appealingly intelligent evocation of the Jewish folk culture' The Guardian 'charming and funny... inventive and amusing' The Telegraph 'Nicholas Wright is one of my favourite dramatists... acutely fresh and sharply researched plays that nonetheless have very distinctive finger marks on them' The Independent 'richly comic but also unexpectedly moving' Telegraph on The Last of the Duchess 'haunting... every bit as impressive as Wright's last big hit, Vincent in Brixton' Sunday Telegraph on The Reporter 'How rare and refreshing it is to encounter a play which is so literate, intelligent, amusing and, finally, moving' Daily Telegraph on Mrs Klein

In a remote village in Eastern Europe, around 1900, the young Motl Mendl is entranced by the flickering silent images on his father's cinematograph. Bankrolled by Jacob, the ebullient local timber merchant, and inspired by Anna, the girl sent to help him make moving pictures of their village, he stumbles on a revolutionary way of storytelling. Forty years on, Motl - now a famed American film director - looks back on his early life and confronts the cost of fulfilling his dreams. How had a twenty-two-year - old pretentious layabout made a discovery that would elude every other cinematic pioneer for years to come? Nicholas Wright's (The Last of the Duchess, Mrs Klein, The Reporter, His Dark Materials) new play is as funny as it is fascinating - a tribute to the Eastern European immigrants who became major players in Hollywood's golden age. It premiered at the National Theatre, London, in 2012, in a production directed by Nicholas Hytner (The History Boys, The Habit of Art), with Antony Sher in the title role of the timber merchant.