Like Network, Ink tackles the role of the media in today’s world. In James Graham’s new play, it’s 1969 and the young Rupert Murdoch has just purchased The Sun and is determined to disrupt the comfortable elitism of Fleet Street journalism.
Also like Network, the play features stellar actors moving with propulsive energy through a spectacular set. Unlike Network, it’s subtle and nuanced. It rejects any temptation to preach or make easy judgments.
As portrayed by Bertie Carvel, Murdoch is awkward, twitchy, ruthless … but surprisingly sympathetic. He’s an outsider in the self-satisfied establishment of the British press. Rich, but Australian. Unclubbable. He steals from the Daily Mirror a dissatisfied editor, the even more unclubbable Yorkshireman Larry Lamb, and together they create the populist press, giving the people what they want. Or so they think.
Larry Lamb early on references the five W’s of journalism, maintaining that who, what, when, and where are critical. Why, according to Lamb, is the least important of the five.
Now that’s interesting, and it’s very suggestive of where tabloid culture has gone. For Lamb (he’s really the central figure of the play), his paper will be about sex, fun, gossip, the weather, free stuff. This is what people care about, he insists, not understanding, for example, the why of international politics.
As I write this, the point seems too obvious, but in fact it’s made in passing. It’s part of a genuinely compelling and entertaining story. Lamb notes, too, that people want stories, and, boy, this is a good one!
The set, by the brilliant Bunny Christie, is a sinister ziggurat of newsroom desks. And at the end of the first act we’re plunged into the dark process of printing a newspaper in the days of hammering type blocks and working molten metal.
It’s exhilarating, and the loud, fiery darkness lurking below the vertiginous desks hints at a hellish, Faustian bargain the newspaper is making with its public. Act II tells the (true) story of the kidnapping and brutal killing of the wife of The Sun’s deputy chairman, a story The Sun used to catapult itself ahead of its competition.
Did the editor have blood on his hands? Graham doesn’t answer that question for us. He leaves it for us, and for the ink-stained Lamb, to contemplate.
Leave a Reply