Travelling Light, National Theatre, review We begin in Hollywood in 1936, with a successful Hollywood director in his sixties looking back on how his career began in a small village in Eastern Europe in the early years of the twentieth century. Now he is known as Maurice Montgomery. Then he was Motl Mendl, the son of a Jewish photographer who came back home to the remote village after his father's death and discovered that his dad, had recently bought an 1896 Lumiere Brothers cinematograph. Mendl becomes fascinated with the machine and starts filming life in his village. What's more a wealthy local timber merchant becomes equally obsessive and becomes his backer. Before long they are discovering that in order to make a profit they need to find somewhere for audiences to see the new films and pay for the privilege. Mendl also comes up with editing techniques and realises that it would be possible to tell stories on film, rather than merely filming the locals going about their daily routines. His glamorous assistant and lover becomes his star thanks to the radiance of her face on film, while rows develop between the driven Motl and the domineering Bindel about money, mistresses and artistic integrity, the familiar battle lines of the movie business. The show is often inventive and amusing, and director Nicholas Hytner has come up with antique looking film of both village life and the narrative movie Mendl makes that is projected onto an on stage screen. But Nicholas Wright's characterisation is flimsy and full of Jewish stereotypes, the love story lacks an erotic charge, and the ending, back in Hollywood in the Thirties somehow contrives to be both confusing and sentimental Antony Sher seems to be auditioning for Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof as the bearded bossy money-man, manically overplaying the role of a Jewish patriarch while Damien Molony lacks warmth and an amorous charge as the fledgling director. As a result his romance with his leading lady (Lauren O'Neil) proves curiously inert. More depth and passion are badly needed and throughout the play one is constantly aware that Wright's play would work much better as a movie than it does in the theatre.