Screen Legends: Andrew Billen Fails to Be Charmed by a Film Fantasy with No Roots in Reality

Beginning of article

Travelling Light

Lyttelton Theatre, London SE1

Reading the text of Travelling Light, I realised that Nicholas Wright's new fantasy about the birth of American cinema was away with the fairies but, I hoped, in a magical way. When I went to see it, however, I saw a troupe trying very hard to be charming, when they needed to try a lot harder to be dramatic, and all the best bits happening in silence in film clips projected above the set.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

What is this fantasy? Nothing less than that Hollywood was born in the shtetls of eastern Europe at the turn of the last century. Wright's ambition in making up a back story for Louis B Mayer, Cecil B DeMille and Sam Goldwyn, and, indeed, an explanation for the Jewish dominance of US cinema, is …