INK
James Graham’s INK does a fantastic job taking its audience back to fast paced, high strung and high stakes world of late 60’s journalism. I walked into this show not knowing anything about Fleet Street, Rupert Murdoch’s rise to power as head media oligarch or the nature of British journalism, and INK wastes no time embroiling you in this foreign, almost fantastical , world.
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Photos © Chris Lundie for New Theatre
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INK tracks the story of a young(er) Rupert Murdoch (Adrian Adam) after his acquisition of the Sun, a floundering newspaper in 1969, but it more intimately centres on Larry Lamb, Murdoch’s chosen editor for the paper. Making Lamb the protagonist of this story was a good call, as of the two characters, he is by far the more sympathetic one. Nick Curnow does an excellent job portraying Larry as someone you empathise with immediately, while balancing this with a hint of the tabloid-esque sleaze he’d imbue into the Sun. Snubbed at his publication the Mirror for his working class background and not being part of the Oxford or Harvard Cabal, watching Larry turn this reject-paper into something that pulls in millions of readers is a story you find it easy to slip into, filled with likeable characters and easy to grasp stakes.
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Photos © Chris Lundie for New Theatre
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The show’s strength lies in the brevity that it can get across themes and ideas - Lamb going around from bar to dingy bar with his co-editor, plucking up the journalistic dregs of society, tells you all you need to know about the people being cobbled together to write for this paper, one of the earliest examples of British tabloid press. Watching these coworkers all sit around a smoke filled writing room, shouting out about how they want more news stories with gossip, or sex, or winning free stuff, was a highlight of the entire production.
Such liveliness and animation in the newsroom was unfortunately not always matched in other aspects of the runtime. Adrian Adam does a great job portraying Murdoch, curmudgeonly even over fifty years ago, as a foul mouthed and money focused parallel to the aristocratic journalists of Britain, but his performance isn’t always matched - with many of these “executives talking” scenes that take place in penthouse offices or fancy restaurants suffering from stumbled over lines or missed queues.
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Photos © Chris Lundie for New Theatre
The set design and music are also both fantastic, with a projector playing real paper headlines over the show to further immerse you, but where the set dressing excelled, the actor’s utilisation of the stage unfortunately fell short. The stage is split into three layers, a foreground, a grate-like partition, and then a background that can hold people on a ground floor and upper storey. Very few scenes take advantage of this multilayered set design, a particular missed opportunity coming from Murdoch and his rival, who are in two different locations, as they both declare their hatred for the opposing media mogul.
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Photos © Chris Lundie for New Theatre
These complaints I have are overshadowed by the humanity and heart shown by Curnow, Adam, and the rest of the newsroom. It’s a dark, slick story that director Louise Fischer seeks to tell, and one that shows you just how vastly different the world of journalism was before one man - with dreams of a newspaper run like a business and not a public service - would change the face of it forever. Putting aside my own personal reservations about portraying Rupert Murdoch as some sort of likeable maverick with a chip on his shoulder, INK excels especially well as a period piece, showing the pitfalls and toxicity of Fleet Street - British journalism - both before and after the rise of tabloid press.
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Catch INK at New Theatre until 29th June
