4 STARS, October 23 – January 6. Ink is a tabloid show evoking the birth of The Sun, Britain’s best selling paper, during the zany pop culture of the 1960's
The experience of this three hour all-singing, all-dancing, expressionist extravaganza, a kind of living cartoon, is like a drunken works outing to Blackpool, or awakening on the sofa to find you are watching the final of Britain’s Got Talent and cannot avoid bombardment by the mass media.
Everything in the show courses with tabloid energy. The brilliant set design of Bunny Christie intrigues immediately, a nightmare vision of a newsroom comprising bundled papers and desks stacked to vertiginous heights.
Then there he is in the flesh, Murdoch, stage left, questioning Albert “Larry” Lamb, stage right, (the second on his list of potential editors – the first was out when he phoned) as to what makes a good story.
Their relationship is established as oppositional to proprietor Cecil King’s Daily Mirror, the country’s most popular paper, and its dignified editor, the journalism genius, Hugh Cudlipp, who had been Lamb’s mentor for ten years. They aim to cock a snook at the patrician business practices and snobbery of the establishment. After all, it is 1969. From China to California “Revolution” is the watchword of the era. At exactly the same time, within weeks, young Richard Branson, is founding Virgin as an anti-establishment brand. And Mary Quant’s mini-skirts cannot rise any higher.
Murdoch fades into the background, only occasionally re-emerging, while Larry Lamb grasps the historic moment to become a roaring, monstrous, dictatorial sociopath who will bathe in blood if necessary to trash The Mirror and capture the heart of the new, cool, crude, hedonistic, white working class male.
James Graham deftly sets out the competition between Cudlipp and Lamb as turning on the difference between popularity and populism. The older man is depicted nurturing the traditional values and aspirations of the respectable working class; his erstwhile protégé instead offers crass nationalism, sport, celebrities, one-sentence paragraphs, chat about television, and a fresh pair of breasts every day. Ka-ching!
Graham’s dialogue fairly crackles along and under Rupert Goold’s direction the loud and colourful clatter of scenes is always entertaining. The audience in St Martin’s Lane enjoys the rivalry and willingly roots for Lamb’s triumph. A Liverpool audience might prove less sympathetic.
The darkness of the tabloids is insufficiently examined. A key section of the play attempts to wrestle with this problem telling how Muriel McKay, the wife of Murdoch’s deputy chairman, was kidnapped. The criminals, two Trinidadian brothers, mistakenly believed they had taken Murdoch’s wife. Every other day ransom demands would arrive, some from Muriel herself begging for help. Instead of supporting police discretion Larry Lamb hyped the story almost certainly contributing to her murder. But, hey, circulation increased. Ka-ching!
The audience, however, are passengers on the kiss-me-quick rollercoaster of this production dashing across a huge cultural landscape. Lost in the blur Muriel McKay becomes somebody who just fell off the ride.
For all that, the show has plenty of food for thought, and the faultless cast is a credit to British theatre.
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