“Ink”
a vivid newspaper story mixed with Murdoch’s Sun melodrama
"Ink"
Written by James Graham, directed by Rupert Goold.
From Almeida Theatre, London. Manhattan Theatre Club at Samuel J.
Friedman Theatre, 261 West 47th Street, New York City.
(212) 239-6200; https://broadway.com/.
Opened April 24, 2019; closes July 7, 2019.
Reviewed by Lucy Komisar May 9, 2019.
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| Jonny Lee Miller as Larry Lamb and Bertie Carvel
as Rupert Murdoch. Photo by Joan Marcus. |
The Sun is a popular newspaper for the undereducated
British masses. It was a broadsheet started in 1964, then reinvented
as a tabloid five years later by the Australian Robert Murdoch and
Larry Lamb, a North Englander he named as editor. They were outsiders
to the London Fleet Street crowd and felt it.
Lamb told Murdoch that the Street, where the major papers were published,
would crush him. The competition was The Mirror, the largest selling
paper in the world. And Murdoch (Bertie Carvel) and Lamb (Jonny
Lee Miller), both portrayed vividly (and you believe it) as tough
and unyielding, will poach and recruit to challenge the “stodgy”
mass circ rag.
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| Bertie Carvel as Rupert Murdoch keeps eyes
on sales figures. Photo by Joan Marcus. |
In this play by James Graham, directed by Rupert Goold,
the Murdoch character seems ill at ease, but he’s a fighter.
He would tell Lamb, “I want to destroy them. I want to crush
them all, grind them down into the dirt!”
Not that this is leading to better journalism. It’s not what
this is about. It’s competition for readers who like scandal
and, it turns out, naked ladies. Oh, also weather, bingo, sports
and free stuff. Horrific headlines. Plus stories about the church
and the royal family. But about gossip, not about the power of those
institutions.
So, it’s a mass marketing business. Wish they didn’t
call it journalism.
As a journalist, I was quite interested in the Murdoch/Lamb theory
of creating the paper, which took over the first act, but found
the second act story to be sheer forgettable melodrama.
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| Jonny Lee Miller as editor Larry Lamb, right,
with the paper’s staff, Robert Stanton, David Wilson Barnes,
Bill Buell, Tara Summers, Eden Marryshow, Andrew Durand. Photo
by Joan Marcus. |
A horror soap opera that shows the paper’s
immorality is the kidnapping of the wife of a deputy editor. Instead
of keeping the story quiet at the request of the police who say
publicity might endanger her, Lamb goes ahead. Front page. It was
populism playing to peoples’ fears. Lamb checks the rise in
sales. As Jonny Lee Miller plays him, Lamb seems sleazier than Murdoch.
SPOILER ALERT
The weirdest part is that she was supposed to have been killed by
radical Muslims, who fed her to the pigs. But Muslims don’t
have pigs!
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| Rana Roy as Stephanie Rahn and
Jonny Lee Miller as Larry Lamb. Photo by Joan Marcus. |
The other horror, crude in a different way, is persuading
an Asian woman (Rana Roy), looking for a break, to be the first
topless page 3 photo.
I liked the set (by designer Bunny Christie), which was wood desks
piled on desks all the way to the ceiling. The set was better than
the play. Or maybe I have to take that back, better than the reality
of Murdoch’s “Sun,” if the story is true.
On the other hand, what is worse, “mainstream” papers
that lie about major stories, such as weapons of mass destruction
in Iraq, invented threats by Iran, and US imperialist attacks on
Venezuela or scandal sheets that purvey obvious claptrap? Have to
admit in that context, Murdoch doesn’t look so bad. And playwright
Graham and director Goold capture the mood perfectly.
Visit Lucy’s website http://thekomisarscoop.com/
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