The British obsession with the weather goes from an easily mocked national quirk to a world-beating point of pride in “Pressure,” a handsome, efficient WWII drama that doesn’t go quite so far as to say a weatherman won the war, but wouldn’t mind one bit if that’s what you came away believing. The “weatherman,” in fact, is Captain James Stagg, the leading Scottish meteorologist who was appointed the Chief Meteorological Officer for Operation Overlord, reporting to General Dwight D. Eisenhower in determining just what day to make D-Day. If that sounds like less than riveting drama, you underestimate both the eternally unpredictable vagaries of the English summer, and the formidable magnetism of one Andrew Scott as Stagg, staunchly arguing with Brendan Fraser‘s Eisenhower about the rain as if thousands of lives depend on it — because, this time, they do.
Though the marketing for “Pressure” — opening wide Stateside this Friday, somewhat surprisingly months ahead of its U.K. bow — is emphasizing the epic scale of its pretty curtailed D-Day dramatization, Anthony Maras‘ film is mostly a chamber piece, set predominantly in the Allied military headquarters where the operation was planned down to the wire, its drama largely contained in tense verbal conflicts over desks and maps and bulletin boards. If, while watching it, you think it would work well on stage, that’s because it already has: Actor-playwright David Haig’s play of the same title was a West End success in 2014, but was perhaps too clipped, too British or too niche to transfer to Broadway.
