'Ink': Rupert Murdoch's U.K. rise at The Sun

‘INK’: (left to right) Andrew Durand, David Wilson Barnes, Rana Roy, Bill Buell, Eden Marryshow, Jonny Lee Miller, Bertie Carvel, Tara Summers, Colin McPhillamy, Robert Stanton, Erin Neufer & Kevin Pariseau. Photo: Joan Marcus

INK
By James Graham
Directed by Rupert Goold
Through July 7, 2019
Manhattan Theatre Club
Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
261 West 47th Street
(212) 239-6200, https://www.manhattantheatreclub.com/2018-19-season/ink/

By Scott Harrah

Americans mostly know Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch for his controversial Fox News Network and the New York Post, but he started his media empire in the tabloid world of Britain 50 years ago when he bought The Sun. The early beginnings of Murdoch’s rise to power and The Sun are the main focus of Ink, a hit in London that recently transferred to Broadway. Ink is a fast-moving look at the Machiavellian underbelly of Fleet Street journalism, with an engrossing script by James Graham, a clever set by Bunny Christie, and explosive performances from most of the cast.

Bertie Carvel portrays Murdoch (a role for which he won the Oliver Award last year) and Jonny Lee Miller plays editor Larry Lamb. As the play opens, it is 1969 and Murdoch has just bought The Sun, a broadsheet with dwindling circulation, and hired Lamb as editor. Murdoch has poached the ambitious Lamb from The Daily Mirror, the highest selling tabloid in the U.K. at the time. Using a set featuring stacked desks, filing cabinets, digital projections and eerie fog, Ink masterfully evokes the sordid environment of British tabloid journalism of the era. As Murdoch says in the play, he wants to create a popular paper for the masses, “one that can ‘unleash’ a part of us, a part of the British character that I think… has never been tapped into, but is there, yearning for stuff.”

Murdoch gives Lamb carte blanche to turn The Sun into a lowbrow scandal sheet for working-class readers, and the two make a pact to outsell the rival Daily Mirror within one year. To reach this goal, Lamb recruits a small but dedicated motley crew of editors, reporters and photographers willing to do anything to appeal to readers and sell papers. Using a combination of stories about crime, sex, celebrity gossip, the Royal Family’s antics, horoscopes, TV, sports, lotto and contests, Lamb will stoop to any low to sell. The formula works, but there are, of course, consequences.

Ink chronicles the scurrilous lengths Lamb and staff go to, with little regard for taste and ethics. The kidnapping of an editor’s wife and the grisly outcome becomes a front-page daily series for sensationalism’s sake. The more lurid the paper becomes, it seems “the scum also rises” at The Sun as circulation skyrockets. The paper first publishes cheesecake glamour photos of scantily clad women but, in order to sell more papers, Lamb decides that the “Page 3 girl” must go topless.

A remarkable ensemble of 18 actors plays various roles. They even perform some outrageous song-and-dance numbers in Act One—which may remind some of Lucy Prebble’s anti-capitalism British hit Enron—but Ink is not a musical. It’s a serious drama about all the “fun” of British tabloid journalism and the moral and ethical dilemmas Murdoch and his editors created. Murdoch and Lamb are not portrayed as villains here. In fact, Murdoch emerges looking quite heroic as a shrewd businessman who created a global media conglomerate. It is Lamb, the anti-establishment antihero, who pushes the proverbial envelope of taste and truth. In Ink, Murdoch actually has many reservations about Lamb’s unsavory editorial decisions and shady business practices. Playwright James Graham steers clear of any depiction of Murdoch and the conservative agenda he eventually created worldwide because, in the early 1970s, this simply had not happened yet. The Sun was only then beginning to cover Tory politics. In one of the final scenes between the two, Murdoch talks about going to America and starting a TV network. We now know, of course, he was talking about Fox News, but Ink is apolitical and simply chronicles the early days of Murdoch and Lamb and the frustration with tradition the working classes and the disenfranchised had half a century ago.

Ink is a masterpiece because as well as being meticulously written by Mr. Graham and tightly directed by Rupert Goold, it is an eerily prophetic tale of how Rupert Murdoch saw the potential for selling populism to the masses decades ago. Whether this, along with other factors, helped fan the flames of nationalism and xenophobia that created Brexit in the U.K. and the election of Trump in the U.S. is an ongoing debate between liberals and conservatives.

Forget about politics and just go see Ink for the great theatrical epic it is, with its well-executed story about the glory days of the dying craft of print journalism. Mr. Carvel and Mr. Miller’s virtuoso portrayals of Murdoch and Lamb are electrifying, and Rupert Goold directs everything at a breakneck pace, getting solid, unforgettable performances from the cast, making it the best Broadway drama of 2019 so far.

Edited by Scott Harrah
Published April 28, 2019
Reviewed at April 27, 2019 press performance.

‘INK’: (left to right) Robert Stanton, David Wilson Barnes, Bill Buell, Tara Summers, Eden Marryshow, Andrew Durand & Jonny Lee Miller. Photo: Joan Marcus