Frieze Sculpture 2019

On 16 May 2019, I posted a report entitled “Two Art Fairs & Joan Miró at MoMA,” covering Art New York 2019 and Frieze New York 2019 (both 2-5 May), along with the Museum of Modern Art’s Joan Miró: Birth of the World (24 February-15 June).  After the report proper, I added a short afterword in which I said that in conjunction with its 2019 art fair, the Frieze organization would present Frieze Sculpture in Rockefeller Center from 25 April to 28 June, a free, mostly outdoor exhibition of sculptures by 14 artists in 16 locations around Rockefeller Plaza.  (Some artists’ works were shown in more than one spot and several locations included more than one piece.  There are actually 23 sculptures on exhibit.)  When my companion at the Frieze art exhibit on Randalls Island, Diana, saw the announcement of the sculpture show, she expressed interest in checking it out.  In the end, she wasn’t able to get to the Rock Center display, so I went alone on Wednesday afternoon about 1 p.m., 26 June, two days before the show closed.

2019’s Frieze Sculpture was intended to be the first of an annual event.  Conceived by Loring Randolph, artistic director of Frieze New York, it was inspired partly by Frieze Sculpture in Regent’s Park, an offshoot of Frieze London.  Randolph hired Brett Littman, the new director (since April 2018) of the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum in Long Island City, Queens, to curate the exhibit.  Littman, in turn, collected sculptures by artists from diverse backgrounds to display around Rockefeller Plaza: Kiki Smith, Walter De Maria, Sarah Sze, Hank Willis Thomas, Nick Cave, Aaron Curry, Jose Dávila, Rochelle Goldberg, Goshka Macuga, Joan Miró, Jaume Plensa, Paulo Nazareth, Pedro Reyes, and Ibrahim Mahama.  

Frieze Sculpture wasn’t the first time that Rock Center has been the venue for art displayed on a large scale.  Jeff Koons (American, 1955), Thomas Houseago (British, b. 1972), and art partners Michael Elmgreen (Danish, b. 1961) and Ingar Dragset (Norwegian, b. 1969) have been among the recent artists who’ve had displays in Rockefeller Center.  The Frieze show, however, was apparently the first exhibit with multiple works occupying most of the area.  The curator explained his plan thus:

One thing that I was very concerned about was doing something that was different from what other institutions have done there, which is generally just one monumental sculpture, either on 5th Avenue or in front of 30 Rock Plaza.  The thing that I really wanted to do [was to] curate an alternative sculpture park that was more human scale.  I really wanted to force the viewer to be a flaneur and to walk the whole campus, so not everything is consolidated in one place.

By definition, Frieze Sculpture was also the first to have works of art displayed in several spots in the Center at the same time.  Flâneur is a French word that means ‘loafer,’ ‘idler,’ ‘dawdler,’ or ‘loiterer,’ and usually carries an indolent connotation, but, of course, Littman wanted us to stroll leisurely, but not obliviously or self-absorbedly, around the plaza and take in the art, always mindful, I think, of the site and its echoes, sometimes its dissonance, with the art we were seeing.  The New York Times’ Martha Schwendener seemed to think Littman and the Frieze sculptors succeeded when she declared: “Despite the distractions, the sculptures do exactly what public art is supposed to do and activate the space.”

In sum, the Frieze Sculpture was interesting, but I wouldn’t want to own any of the piece on display . . . well, maybe a couple—but not enough to come by after closing to pick them up!  (For those who don’t know, when I used to go to art shows with my mother, we’d judge if it was a good exhibit or not by whether we’d come back on a “Midnight Shopping Trip” to pick up a painting or sculpture or two.)

Porte II by Joan Miró (Spanish, 1893-1983) from 1974 was the only “old” piece in the show.  A large cast-bronze Cubist and proto-Surrealist piece, the sculpture is shaped like an opened step ladder with a rusty, large-linked chain hanging down the center.  (Miró “made it . . . decades before ‘Game of Thrones,’ where it could fit right in,” quipped Barbara Hoffman and Tamara Beckwith in the New York Post.)  I didn’t find it nearly as appealing or whimsical as his paintings.  (Other posts pertaining to Joan Miró are “Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape,” 5 October 2012, and “Van Gogh & Miró at MoMA (2008),” 12 October 2016.)  The next oldest sculpture was a kind of installation called Truth / Beauty which Walter De Maria (American, 1935-2013) started in 1993, but which wasn’t finished until 2016, three years after he died.  The rest were all 2017 and 2018—very contemporary.  Many were more curious than engaging. 

On the other hand, the walk around Rock Center was pleasant enough—though it was quite warm in the bright sun.  There's precious little shade around the plaza—though a few of the pieces were in building lobbies.  But for 16 sculptures, it was fine.  (Finding all of the pieces wasn’t easy—a bit like an Easter egg hunt; I found the map of the art locations a little misleading sometimes, but I got home at about 2:30, in time for a late lunch.} 

I should also express a complaint that neither Frieze nor the Rockefeller Center provided anything on the exhibit except in a loose-leaf binder at the visitors’ desk in 30 Rock which was only available to look at.  Even on line, there was very little—except a PDF of the layout map—on the artists or their works on display.  To be sure, there were large signs standing near each art work (or, in many instances, a group of works), but these provided only the artists’ names, the works’ titles and dates, and the galleries that handle the artists.  Artists’ life dates and nationality, and the composition of the sculptures weren’t indicated, nor was any explanation of the pieces’ intents or meanings. 

Museums have cut back severely on exhibit materials—I don’t know if galleries have also reduced their printed materials as well; it’s been a while since I went to a commercial gallery.  The art fairs, like Frieze New York and Art New York, seem to go all out to provide background material like artist bios and descriptions of the works, but those are special exhibits.

Rockefeller Center, of course, is a year-round repository for a great deal of art, largely from the 1930s, the era in which the complex was built.  Almost everyone knows Lee Lawrie’s (German-born American, 1877-1963) iconic bronze statue of Atlas (1937) on 5th Avenue in front of the International Building (also known as 630 5th Avenue or 45 Rockefeller Plaza), across from St. Patrick’s Cathedral.  There’s also the immediately-recognizable Prometheus (1934), the gilded, cast-bronze sculpture by Paul Manship (American, 1885-1966) at the west end of the Skating Rink (which, during the summer season, is converted into an outdoor restaurant called the Summer Garden & Bar).

Like most of the permanent art works in Rockefeller Center, these two well-known sculptures are classic examples of Art Deco-style art.  Also on display around the Center are murals and bas-reliefs that decorate all the buildings of Rock Center.  Isamu Noguchi’s (Japanese-born American, 1904-1988) stainless steel bas-relief entitled News (1940) in 50 Rockefeller Plaza (formerly the Associated Press Building) on the pedestrian promenade west of 5th Avenue, between 50th and 51st Streets.  (News was the piece of art at Rockefeller Center that inspired Randolph to organize Frieze Sculpture.)

The hub of Rock Center, 30 Rock (formerly called the RCA Building, later the GE Building, and now renamed the Comcast Building), is replete with works of art.  Behind the visitors’ desk, across from the entrance on Rockefeller Plaza (the pedestrian walkway that runs from 48th Street to 51st Street between 5th and 6th Avenues), is a mural from Josep Maria Sert (Spanish, 1874-1945) called American Progress (1937), an allegorical depiction of men constructing modern America.  It was commissioned by the Rockefellers to replace Diego Rivera’s (Mexican, 1886-1957) mural Man at the Crossroads (1934), which Nelson Rockefeller (1908-79; later Governor of New York State and Vice President of the United States) ordered destroyed because it included an image of Vladimir Lenin.  (Rivera was famously a committed communist.  The Rockefellers were famously capitalist industrialists, politicians, and bankers—and rock-ribbed Republicans.)

Flanking Sert’s mural, in front of the desk, were two pieces from Frieze Sculpture, Jaguar and Seer (both 2018) by Pedro Reyes (b. 1972).  Ironically (or perhaps deliberately), Reyes is, like Rivera, Mexican and his two sculptures clearly evoke Mayan or Aztec motifs; Rivera was devoted to the native images of Mexican life and culture, celebrating both its Indian and Mestizo origins.  Both artists share a commitment to social and political concerns.  The sculptures are carved of dark gray volcanic stone and stand on four-foot-tall rough-hewn stone pedestals. 

Jaguar depicts a mouth-shaped hole within which is a human-like eye.  (Certainly ironic and unintentional is the positioning of Jaguar with its all-seeing eye in the building that houses the headquarters and studios of the National Broadcasting Company.  The eye is recognizable as the perpetual symbol of the Columbia Broadcasting System!)  Seer is stylistically similar but shows an eye-shaped hole out of which protrudes a mammalian tongue. 

Reyes’s Jaguar and Seer, are surely exemplars of the friction between the art work and its display setting.  In a building devoted to communication and journalism, seeing and speaking are apt images.  According to curator Littman, as a pair, Reyes’s sculptures represent “sentinels, in a way. providing a witness to an important moment of censorship of art in this country.”  It was no accident, then, that the Reyes pieces were placed at the location of the destroyed—it wasn’t merely removed; it was smashed—Rivera mural, a violent example of political censorship by a powerful “conservative” family. 

When Frieze director Randolph first saw Noguchi’s News, she explained, it affected her profoundly:

It felt really important in this moment because it was a commission for the Associated Press.  We’re in a kind of difficult moment in the world, politically and socially.  And given what is going on with the war of the press from our administration, it felt like it had real relevance now.

Nonetheless, Littman, who had a free hand to select and site the art in the show, didn’t make deliberate, or at least conscious, politically oriented choices.  “I don’t think that was necessarily part of the calculation,” he said, “—maybe subconsciously, of course, one thinks about that.”  Randolph affirmed, “There are works in the group that make a statement.”

“We are in unstable times politically,” Frieze New York’s artistic director pointed out, “and if there is something to be gained through artistic understanding, artistic output and knowledge, collaboration—all of these things—then that is definitely something that I would want to have and make central to what our presence is in the middle of Manhattan.”

A work that has political implications, aside from the two Reyes sculptures, is perhaps the most unusual piece in Frieze Sculpture.  Most of the art was made of the usual contemporary sculpture materials: metal, stone, wood, resin—some was cast, some carved, some bent and twisted.  Ibrahim Mahama (b. 1987), a Ghanaian artist, created 50 tattered jute flags to replace the 192 national banners of the members of the United Nations that surround the Summer Garden. 

Unlike the flags they replaced for Frieze Sculpture, Mahama’s piece don’t wave or flutter in the wind (the jute, from bags that had been used to carry coffee, concrete, and other goods, and other components are too heavy); they just hang down the poles, limp and immobile.  The artist observed, “These containers gather a lot of memory over time as they encounter various forms of labor.  These labor forms are mostly unaccounted for once the commodities reach their destination due to the system of global trade.”  He added, “I believe that it is important to allow true independence for labor to be fully appreciated in these current times.  The issue of exploited labor is a global one, and I wanted to address that through the form of this installation.”

In an interview, the Ghanaian artist explained: “The flags themselves are not necessarily what I think of as being the sculpture; however, the entire space and forms that they create are.  The poles help complete the idea of the sculpture.” 

“For Mahama,” explained Littman, “these pieces are about global capitalism; the idea of the spice trade, the slave trade; the idea of recycled materials, of third-world economies and how things can be reused.”  For himself, as curator of the public exhibit, he asserted: “What I’m doing is taking down the whole world—the whole UN—and replacing it with a very pointed artwork, which will definitely change the feeling of Rockefeller Center.”

Probably the works with the most obvious political commentary—made perhaps more meaningful at this moment than the artist might have predicted when he conceived them, are Paulo Nazareth’s (Brazilian, b. 1977) four pieces called DRY CUT [from BLACKS IN THE POOL] (all 2019).  The larger-than-life size aluminum cut-outs, two in front of 30 Rock (Tommie and Ruby) and two inside 45 Rockefeller Plaza (Martin and Rosa), depict significant figures of the Civil Rights movement: Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., Tommie Smith (one of the Olympic medalists in Mexico City in 1968 who raised the black-gloved, clenched-fist Black Power salute from atop the medal podium to protest racism and injustice against African-Americans), and Ruby Bridges (the first African-American child to desegregate the all-white William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans in 1960). 

All these figures stood up and spoke out against injustice, which was a theme of Frieze Sculpture, even if Littman hadn’t intended to send such a message.  Quite a few of the art works in the show expressed this idea, some much more obliquely and metaphorically, like Nick Cave’s (American, 1959) 2018 untitled bronze piece which is a an old horn-shaped gramophone speaker with an arm emerging from it, ending in a fist. 

For most visitors, the entry to Rockefeller Center is on 5th Avenue, then west through the Channel Gardens to the Skating Rink/Summer Garden to the Plaza.  Standing about 25 feet high, right at the entrance, was Behind the Walls (2019) by Jaume Plensa (Spanish, b. 1955).  The monumental white polyester-resin and marble-dust sculpture depicts the elongated head of a woman with her hands in front of her face, covering her eyes as if she were playing peek-a-boo or saying, “I can’t look!  I can’t look!”  On his website, Plensa asserts:

Sometimes, our hands are the biggest walls.  They can cover our eyes, and we can blind ourselves to so much of what’s happening around us. . . .  To me, it’s an obsession to create a beautiful object with a message inside.

The artist says, “It is a very direct piece.  Many times we are blinding ourselves with our hands to be in a more comfortable position.”  Personally, Plensa hopes the sculpture will serve as a “mirror” so “you can look inside and think about your opinions, your attitudes, what you are doing in your own life.”  Says Littman, in contrast: “It’s kind of the way that I feel every morning.  You put your hands over your eyes and you go, ‘I can’t believe we’re going to have to deal with another day like this.’”  A palpable example of art taking on different meaning for different people at different times.

A few steps along the gardens’ flowery path, a Frieze Sculpture visitor would have encountered Rest Upon (2009) by Kiki Smith (West German-born American, b. 1954), a life-sized bronze sculpture of a female figure, very evocative of Alice of Through the Looking Glass portraying Mary of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” (or, as Liddy Berman of Architectural Digest felt, “the work feels like a fairy-tale tableau, something a lucky woodcutter would stumble upon in an enchanted glade”), dozing with a lamb lying on top of her recumbent form. 

In the context of the art in conversation with its exhibition environment, Rest Upon is immensely complex.  Smith’s statue is, of course, a recreation of nature: a human being and a lamb, but created of an artificial substance, and not cast in a totally realistic representation of an actual woman or lamb, as Smith’s art work is slightly impressionistic.  The sculpture’s placed within an artificially created imitation of a natural environment, a carefully designed and landscaped garden with hewn-stone walkways and flower and greenery plots.  The young woman is lying not on a grassy lawn or meadow, but on hard stones. 

There are other people all around, walking through the Channel Gardens, shopping in the stores that line the garden walk, or simply going to or from Rockefeller Center and 5th Avenue.  Few, aside from me, were even looking at Smith’s sculpture.  The total image is a very mixed one—a collaboration, though an inadvertent one, among Smith (who created Rest Upon), Littman (who placed it “based on very specific conscious decisions”), the architects of Rockefeller Center (who designed the overall environment), and the grounds keepers and gardeners of the Center (who selected and maintain the flowers and plants in the immediate venue).  Passers-by have a hand in this as well. 

Littman had selected the sites for each display carefully, with deliberate consideration of “the Rockefeller Center campus and its history.”  He “wanted the layout to compel the viewer to explore beyond just the outdoor spaces, which is where public sculpture has traditionally been sited.”  Of the nearly two dozen pieces in Frieze Sculpture, the works of four artists were placed in the lobbies of four of Rockefeller Center’s Art Deco buildings. 

In 10 Rockefeller Plaza, formerly the headquarters of Eastern Air Lines, once (1926-91) one of the “Big Four” domestic airlines in the United States, Littman set out two installations by Goshka Macuga (Polish, b. 1967), International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, Configuration 25, First Man: Yuri Gagarin, centered on a portrait head of the Soviet cosmonaut, the first man in space in 1961; and International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, Configuration 26, Before the Beginning: Stephen Hawking, the world-renowned astrophysicist (both pieces from 2016).

The heads are cast in bronze but painted: Gagarin’s in his space helmet is eggshell white and Hawking is candy-apple green.  The heads have several feet of one-inch pipe radiating from them—or leading into them.  Littman explains, “For me, these works act as a conceptual homage to all kinds of travel, so it seemed perfect to use the location of [Dean] Cromwell’s [American, 1892-1960] mural [The Story of Transportation (1946), displayed behind the Macugas in 10 Rockefeller Plaza] to highlight this aspect of the work.”

Across the promenade, at 1 Rockefeller Plaza, was Truth / Beauty, an installation of three black granite pallets (from a series of 14) in a line on which sat two pairs of polished polygonal stainless-steel bars.  The assemblage was started by Walter De Maria (American, 1935-2013) in 1993 and finished in 2016 by his estate according to the artist’s wishes.  Each granite base has “TRUTH” and “BEAUTY” engraved on opposite sides—“TRUTH” on one edge and “BEAUTY” on the other—and the rods increase by two sides with each successive couple. 

(The full series starts with five-sided bars and ends in 17-sided rods.  I didn’t count the sides on the three pairs in Frieze Sculpture.  De Maria had apparently completed the rods, but the bases and the assembly were left to the estate after the artist’s death.  He had also not yet engraved the labels on the edges of the bases, but his studio director worked with Gagosian Gallery, which handles De Maria’s work, to locate an expert engraver for the project.)

The bases were oriented north-south in 1 Rockefeller Plaza, and the labels were on the north and south sides of the square pallets.  On the northernmost and southernmost pallets, the rods were laid out in a chevron configuration, all four pairs facing south; on the center base, the bars were in an X formation (or two single chevrons, pointed toward each other).  Permutations of polished steel bars is a motif of De Maria’s work.  According to Amy Verner of the design and architecture magazine Wallpaper:

[Truth / Beauty] is not the first time that De Maria imbued a work with language; but with these two words, he is inviting viewers to confront a powerful duality that has inspired and challenged philosophers and artists since the dawn of Plato. . . .  Indeed, one can’t help but think of Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn: “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

There was considerable coverage of Frieze Sculpture, but it was either descriptive—much of it drawn from the exhibit publicity and press releases, so it was an echo chamber—or interviews of Frieze New York, Frieze Sculpture, or Rockefeller Center officials.  (Two or three articles, such as one in the New York Post, quoted many visitors to the exhibit as well as a few of the organizers and some of the artists.)  While these articles and posts were often informative and interesting—I drew on some of them myself—they weren’t reviews.  So where I planned to quote press criticism of the sculpture show, I can’t. 

I could glean that most of the journalists authoring this coverage were excited to see this innovative use of an important and historic Midtown site and the artists whose work Littman selected to display, particularly the ones making U.S. débuts or rare appearances here.  The newness of the art and the way it was mounted were obviously impressive to the members of the Fourth Estate who covered the event, but I can’t tell you if any of them actually liked the inaugural Frieze Sculpture—or if they felt a little like I did: interested in the phenomenon, but not so much drawn into the art experience.  I’m going to have to leave you with only my assessment without knowing how I fit into the patchwork quilt of opinions.

Directors You’d Rather Not Work With

by Kirk Woodward

[As even occasional readers of Rick On Theater know, my friend Kirk Woodward is a thoughtful and longtime student of theater.  This means he’s not only conversant with the many theories of acting, directing, and playwriting, as well as theater history and the writings of scads of theater people both famous and obscure, but that he knows the practical workings of the art and craft.  Furthermore, Kirk’s a theater practitioner—an actor, director, playwright, composer, lyric-writer, and teacher —so he’s applied what he’s learned in theaters, studios, and classrooms, working with real people.  The trait that’s applicable here is that Kirk examines what he sees, experiences, and does in those venues and turns those lessons back into practice as he continues to work. 

[In this article, Kirk looks at his experiences as a director and an actor having been directed (as well as the experiences of other artists he knows) and analyzes them for lessons of not what to do as a director, but what not to do.  (At the end of Kirk’s discussion, I’ve added some of my own experiences and what I’ve discerned from them.)  What he’s compiled in “Directors You’d Rather Not Work With” is a practical guide for directors (and prospective directors) to practices to avoid and habits to break.  As a companion to this briefer look at directing, I also suggest ROTters take a look back as Kirk’s earlier four-parter, “Reflections On Directing” (11, 14, 17, and 20 April 2013); note that my afterword to the fourth installment (https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2013/04/reflections-on-directing-tech.html) includes a list of useful books and texts on directing. 

[Here are other ROT posts concerning directing:

·         “Similes, Metaphors—And The Stage,” 18 September 2009

·         “Staging Shakespeare,” 21 September 2009

·         “Directing Twelfth Night For Children” by Kirk Woodward, 16 and 19 December 2010

·         “‘Reworking the Classics: Homage or Ego Trip?’” by Robert Brustein, 10 March 2011 [note: this post is the republication of a New York Times article from 1988; the first cross-reference in this list is my commentary on this article]

·         “Vanity, Thy Name Is Actor-Director,” 22 September 2011

·         “David Mamet On Acting & Directing,” 16 August 2013

·         “Staging Classic Plays: Traditional or Experimental? (Shaliko’s Ghosts, 1975),” 6 September 2014

·         “Evaluating A Director” by Kirk Woodward, 1 March 2017

·         “On Directing Shakespeare” by Kirk Woodward, 1 March 2019;

[As for my own directing début, I actually avoided directing for a long time.  My rationale was that I was neither smart enough nor stupid enough to try directing: not smart enough to know all I’d need to in order to stage a play, and not stupid enough to try in the face of my ignorance.  I did only what directing I had to in college and grad school (required projects for directing classes); I did no directing in the army in between, though I participated in the army’s Special Services theater program and even helped start a theater troupe in Berlin at Tempelhof Air Force Base. 

[Then, after acting in a bunch of shows in grad school and then in New York City, being directed by both good and bad (and also middling) directors, I started to feel I’d been apprenticing to a degree and wanted to see if I could do it myself at least as well as the good ones I’d experienced.  That’s when I approached Arthur Reel, artistic director of the Drama Committee Repertory Theatre, an Off-Off-Broadway showcase house for which I’d been acting since getting my MFA, and asked him to let me direct something there.  He said he’d think about it and let me know when something appropriate came up.  That process was cut short when the cast of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest fired its director and Arthur called me to take over—a case of right time/right place—or  more truthfully, desperation!  I was not quite 32.

[When I took over the direction of Earnest, I decided on two things: first, I wouldn’t tell any of the cast that this was my first pro directing job (until the cast party after opening, when I fessed up).  Second, I did one of the “bad” things Kirk lists below: I pretended I knew exactly what I was doing, made definitive choices, and spoke with assumed authority so that the cast would feel not only that I knew what I was about, but that they now had someone in charge and looking out for the production.  At our first meeting—they ran a rehearsal for me—the actors said they all felt lost and adrift and were scared of being left to fend for themselves.  I wanted to mend that at once. 

[What I was doing, with malice of forethought, was playing the role of the knowledgeable director—I was acting in real life.  (I claim I’d been doing that all the time I was in the army—playing the role of an “army officer.”)  I hadn’t  earned this authority, however—either with this cast or as a consequence of long years of experience.  The cast apparently never tumbled to the deception because all the actors were receptive and willing all through rehearsals and when we opened, very complimentary about having worked with me.  That’s when I confessed that theirs had been my first production as a director.  They all said they didn’t believe it, but this was at the cast party and everyone was a little drunk by then.  I think they were also probably very relieved that they made it to opening!)  ~Rick]

A friend has urged me to write something about the kind of directors that one wouldn’t want to work with, and this friend has urged me to write it in the form of a “Top Ten List,” the way David Letterman used to do. Of course people who use the Letterman “Top Ten List” format belong on some sort of list themselves, and I’m not sure how to order the items in this list, either. Still, I did come up with ten. Readers are welcome to send in their own suggestions. [I second the motion. ~Rick]

Before getting into specifics, we should note that none of these categories are absolutes. The best director in the world, whoever that might be, may under pressure, or by reflex, engage in some pretty unproductive behavior. I’m hardly the best director in the world, but I should know. I do know. I’ve done those very things.

The directors I’m writing about here are theater directors. I suspect that the same ideas apply to film directors, but I have much less experience in that area.

So here are ten of what we might call directorial archetypes. There are probably more.

Note that these are essentially behavioral, not artistic, archetypes. For example, I thought about including in this list the director who can’t direct the genre of the play – specializing, say, in tragedy, but s/he drains the fun out of every line in a comedy. That’s a problem, but it’s an artistic problem, not a behavioral one.

The positive side of these negatives is that we can calculate from them what directors ought to do.

Here goes:

THE DIRECTOR WHO’S NEVER READ THE PLAY

Pretty important to read a play before directing it, wouldn’t you say? Yet within the past few years I’ve run across two directors who literally had not read the works (one a play, one a musical) they were assigned to direct.

This fact did not deter them from telling cast members what they ought to be doing. They assumed an air of authority – which obviously they had to do, since they were basically talking nonsense. Among the gambits for distracting attention from their ignorance of the play: telling the cast repeatedly how experienced they were, and saying, “I’m a minimalist” (which we might translate as “I have nothing to offer”).

Actors have a will to succeed in a play, and even with a director who’s unfamiliar with the material, they will come up with some way to act their roles. They may even save the play, from the audience’s point of view. But they’re waging an uphill struggle if the director doesn’t know the play well enough even to talk about it intelligently.

THE DIRECTOR WITH THE BRIGHT IDEA

There’s a fairly thin line between approaches to a play that are creative, and approaches that are just wacky. Neil Simon (1927-2018) offered a great example of the latter in his script for the film The Goodbye Girl (1977), in which the director of an off-Broadway production of William Shakespeare’s Richard III announces that the “concept” of his production is that the title character is flamboyantly gay, an idea utterly unsupported by the script, and an idea that offers no worthwhile results.

I first ran across the term “bright idea,” in connection with directors, in the book In Search of Theatre, by the eminent drama critic Eric Bentley (b. 1916), published in 1953, but instead of declining in importance since Bentley wrote about it, the directorial “bright idea” approach seems to have increased in influence over the ensuing decades, to the point where many of the most celebrated Broadway directors today are the ones with the most radical notions about how to stage a play – sometimes in ways undreamed of by their authors. [Kirk writes about “the Bright Idea” in “A Note About Hamilton,” 6 December 2016, and again briefly in “Falsettos,” 5 January 2017.]

Directors must use all the creativity they’ve got. But for what purpose? Surely the answer ought to be, “for the purpose of serving the play.” However obvious that may seem – at least to me – it’s definitely not the way every director works today.

Many directors these days seem to feel that plays are “texts” – assemblages of words waiting for someone to make something out of them. This approach began in some academic circles and has popularity, but surely, as Hamlet says, for a director “The play’s the thing.”

There’s much more to a play than just its words. Shouldn’t a director work to find the circumstances and actions that are implicit in the play, rather than arbitrarily invent a new set of them?

THE DIRECTOR WHO ONLY CRITICIZES

An actor looks to a director as a sort of (imperfect) mirror reflecting what’s working well in a performance and what’s not. A director who only criticizes gives actors a distorted “image” of their work – a feeling that everything they’re doing is wrong.

Related to this issue is the director who is so virulent in criticism that the actor feels (and I’d say in fact is) assaulted. My wife Pat once worked with a director who, when he didn’t approve of something, would say, “Wrong and stupid!”

                                 

Actors, like other living things (they are, you know), need to grow, both as actors and in their particular roles, and in order to grow, like other living things, they need nourishment.

THE DIRECTOR WHO ONLY PRAISES

A director who never identifies any problems or obstacles can be almost as unnerving as one who never sees anything good in an actor’s role, and for a similar reason: an actor has nothing substantial to respond to. After a while, praise loses its punch just as criticism does.

I’m sensitive to this particular characteristic because I’ve been accused of it (or accused myself of it) more than once. In my defense, I’d claim that I don’t criticize, I suggest alternatives. Maybe. Probably, though, I just praise too much. I don’t think that praise is as destructive as vituperation. But even the greatest actors are likely to want “constructive criticism,” as long as they know it’s genuinely for their good.

THE DIRECTOR WHO DICTATES EVERY MOVE

I’m always astonished by the director who tells the actors everything, from where they stand to when they breathe. Think about it: actors spend years watching performances, going to classes, evaluating and critiquing their own work and the work of others, and performing – only to be told by a director how many steps to take to the left and how to lift an arm!

Some directors seem to feel that they are the only ones who know how anything can be done on stage.

Actors don’t mind when a director is telling them something they need to know – they welcome it. But the director who gives them no room to develop on their own is conceivably overestimating her or his powers, and in any case wasting a major resource of theater – the ability of the actors.

Theater, it is often said, is a collaborative art, and a good actor can be a skilled collaborator, the exception being when the director’s ego is so large that the director feels no need for collaboration. 

THE DIRECTOR WHO USES ELECTRONIC DEVICES DURING REHEARSAL

At least twice I’ve heard of a director who spent most of the rehearsal period looking at messages on a cellular phone. This behavior is not restricted to theater directors, of course. I once attended a funeral where the presiding clergyperson spend most of the ceremony checking messages. This behavior, we understand, is almost expected these days.

For an actor it has a particular drawback, because one of a director’s best tools is a strong focus on what the actors are doing. There’s ordinarily no audience at a rehearsal; the director is the audience, and if the director’s concentration on the actor is powerful, the actor may feel challenged to dig deeper into the role than might otherwise be the case. 

THE DIRECTOR WHO’S DISORGANIZED

The limitations of this sort of director should be obvious. I have noticed that in some cases disorganization is a sign of self-admiration – “look how active my mind is! I’m all over the place!” I have noticed this in myself, actually.

In many respects a director is a manager. A director manages time – the amount of time a show has in which to come together, the time periods that rehearsals last, and the actors’ time – that is, the demands that the rehearsal schedule puts on their days.

The smaller the cast, the simpler the play, and the fewer the technical requirements of the play, the easier it is for a director to manage time, and a bit of disorganization under those conditions may not be fatal. In a complex show, like a Shakespeare play or almost all musicals, such chaos can be disastrous.

THE DIRECTOR WHOSE REHEARSALS RUN INCREDIBLY LONG

This item is a direct descendent of the previous one. One of a director’s major responsibilities is time management.

In performances sanctioned by the actors’ union, Actors Equity, rehearsal hours, break times, and off days are strictly regulated, a response to the bad old days of theater in the early twentieth century, when actors had to do what management told them and could be fired, abandoned, or otherwise mistreated at any time and without any recourse.  [For further information on this aspect of theater and acting, see my two-part article “Actors’ Equity at 100” (especially Part One), 19 and 22 June 2013. ~Rick] Those days are gone, except that they still exist, on a different scale, in community theater.

One can make the case that actors in community theater actually work harder than Broadway actors. They often have day jobs as well, which means that their total working hours are longer than a Broadway actor ever faces.

“Theater is always inconvenient.” This saying is basically true; rehearsals and performances tend to take place during times when one might rather be home watching TV. But watching TV is not the only thing people do at home, and it’s simply not fair to make volunteers wreck their lives for the sake of, say, a production of See How They Run, because the director is reckless with their time.

THE DIRECTOR WHO’S A NUT CASE

Directing by its nature attracts some odd characters, because the decision to be a person who orders other people around is in its nature a dangerous one – we see examples of this every day, and not just in the theater. Occasionally one runs into a director who’s, not just odd, but bananas.

Unfortunately, this sometimes takes the form of, basically, sadism, as in a case I know of a director who had actors redo a violent scene to the point where they were both psychologically and physically injured.

When one finds oneself in such a situation, the best advice I know is: Get out! No one “owes” a production or a director anything under those circumstances.

THE DIRECTOR WHO WANTS TO ACT EVERY ROLE (OR YOUR ROLE)

Some directors are frustrated actors. (For that matter, some directors are just plain actors.) An awareness of the nuts and bolts of acting is crucial for a director, because a director who understands an actor’s tools can make intelligent recommendations about which tools to use. So having acted is often an asset for a director.

On the other hand, many directors acquire this knowledge by first being actors themselves, but such experience isn’t a necessity. The seminal director Peter Brook (b. 1925), for example, credited all his preparation to watching plays; he was never an actor.

In any case, being a great actor does not guarantee that the same person will be a great director, and such a condition may even be a limitation – maybe a great actor could play your role better, but that’s not the point, since you’ll be the one on stage, not that actor.

In practical terms, the director who wants to act every role may – and very likely may – spend a great deal of a rehearsal performing for the cast and saying, “Do it that way.”

*  *  *  *

Weirdly, there are very good directors who have one or more of the habits listed above. For example, many good directors are extremely specific with actors. Some very fine directors have “concepts” for plays that are both off-the-wall and illuminating.  Sir Laurence Olivier (1907-1989) called the producer and successful director Jed Harris (1900-1979) “the most loathsome man I’d ever met.” Some notable actors have also excelled as directors; Olivier himself was, if not a great director, at least a very good one.

Can “bad traits” then be “good traits” where directors are concerned? Perhaps. Good directors inevitably work in ways best suited to themselves, and have limited success with approaches to directing that don’t suit them. Basically, they go with what they’ve got. If their methods are irregular, still those methods may be their road to success.

On the other hand, I can think of no good directors who neglect to read the play, spend rehearsal time working on electronic devices, have no sense of organization or time, or are just plain crazy.

Essentially all the behaviors listed here, with the possible exception of the “nut case,” can be changed. Awareness and experience both can help. Putting the play and the actors even slightly ahead of oneself is a good start.

[In reference to Kirk’s last paragraph above:  I suspect that both the “nut case” and the “Bright Idea” director are incurable.  If the Bright Idea director didn’t have that Bright Idea, what would s/he do?  That’s her/his motivation; without it, s/he wouldn’t have any reason to show up.  (Maybe that’s the only cure for a Bright Idea director.  Abstinence!)

[Kirk’s description of the Bright Idea production sounds exactly like what Joe Miklojcik (the department TD at Rutgers when I was in the MFA acting program there) referred to as ”Hamlet on roller skates”!  It also fits what I said about Sam Gold’s Glass Menagerie in my report on that production (posted on 8 April 2017).

[Also, Kirk’s comments on how Bright Idea directors treat texts sounds like a main tenet of Deconstructionism—that everything is open to interpretation and reinterpretation from any perspective; that artists (and others) don’t really own their work or ideas.  (The Situationists—see my article “Guy Debord & The Situationists,” posted on 3 February 2012—took a similar tack, called détournement, in the 1960s, but they were consciously and deliberately subverting the artists’ rights of ownership as part of their politico-socio-artistic message.  Deconstructionists simply refuse to recognize ownership of intellectual property or works of art.)

[The situation with the director who dictates every move happened at Rutgers to one of the MFA actresses in Neil Cuthbert’s Hot Potatoes with me in 1976.  I found her in the lobby of the department building, sitting on the floor crying.  (This actress wasn’t a youngster; she was older than I was and I was about five years older than most of our classmates.)  She’d gotten frustrated with Jack Bettenbender, the department chair who was directing Hot Potatoes, telling her every move and line-reading and was feeling that he didn’t respect or trust her as an artist.  I told her that he’d done the same thing with me at the start, but I learned just to ignore him and do my work and as long as I got results, he backed off.  

[Now, I have two more “bad directors” to add to Kirk’s list.  First, the one who does nothing—gives no notes, no direction (even blocking), no ideas.  I had such a director for Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband at the Drama Committee (1977-78) and the cast fought back finally by holding our own rehearsals and setting the show to that point by consensus.  (I think the director’s notion had been to let us find some ideas ourselves and then winnow them down and set the best ones—but she let it go on way too long and we felt unmoored and got scared.  Either that, or she had no ideas of her own and hoped we’d come up with some she could use.)  The original director of DCRT’s Earnest (1978-79) was fired by the cast for this reason, and it became my first priority to correct this deficiency..

[The other bad director may or may not be in the “behavioral” category: the director who casts him/herself in the play.  (I have a similar issue with the playwright who directs his/her own play—though the problems this decision causes are different.)  Actors directing themselves is always problematical and difficult, but it’s also a huge ego maneuver that exacerbates the difficulties.  When I did a Macbeth in Tribeca (1981 at the Process Studio Theatre), the director also played the title role—and he was so busy working on his part that the rest of us felt neglected—and I don’t mean that as an emotional issue; our work wasn’t being attended to.  The three of us who were playing Malcolm, Macduff, and Ross (me) took the England Scene off on our own to rehearse it—and audience members, who mostly didn’t know us or what we’d done,  said it was the best scene in the production.  (We used it as an audition piece for the three of us in tandem a couple of times.)  The same director had done Much Ado About Nothing (1979) before the Macbeth—he wasn’t in that one, but I did Don John—and he (and the production) was excellent. 

                                                                                     

[I described this experience and some others—including a Hamlet starring and directed by another egotist—in “Vanity, Thy Name Is Actor-Director,” referenced in my foreword to “Directors You’d Rather Not Work With.”]

'Ink'

[My play report on the current Broadway première of Ink is considerably longer than my usual reports.  The extra length—over half the post—is attributable to the review survey I always include at the end.  Ink attracted so much press attention when it came to New York City, more outlets covered it than I commonly find on the ’Net.  Review outlets that had given up on theater. reviewing. came out to play, including. the Daily News and the (Murdoch-owned) Post; I also hadn’t seen NY1 or WNYC post notices for a while..  Several websites I haven't seen in months  or years, like TheaterScene,com, also appeared on the scene.  I wonder of this is in response to a play about newspapering? 

[Rather than reduce the selection or trim the quotations, I decided to let the reporting of the critical reception exceed my self-imposed maximum length.  Though I don’t endorse it, ROTters may choose to stop after my performance evaluation.  I recommend you stay with the report, however, and see what the published reviewers had to say about this play.  ~Rick]

When Diana, my usual theater companion, agreed to partner with me in getting tickets for James Graham’s Ink, the British import about Rupert Murdoch’s precipitous entry into the London newspaper world, I had concerns.  I was leery about seeing the play because I was afraid I wouldn’t like it because I have such contempt for Murdoch’s politics and business practices that I was afraid I’d hate the character.  Oddly, for reasons you’ll see in a moment, I didn’t end up hating the Rupert Murdoch of the play—I did, however, dislike the play for dramaturgical reasons.

I’ll be brief on Ink for now: it’s long, it’s a mess, and I disliked it a lot.  For once, Diana and I agreed: it accomplishes nothing (and does it pretentiously).  I can’t figure out why the Manhattan Theatre Club would want to bring Ink to New York; I assume the theater actually sent someone to see it and didn’t just rely on London reviews. 

(The Evening Standard declared, “Hold the front page: a huge hit” and the Telegraph reported, “Once again finding a play for today in what looked like yesterday’s news, Graham has surely penned a super, soaraway smash.”  Even the London Times, now also owned by Murdoch, said that Ink is “a broncobuster of a play and Rupert Goold, the director, mostly lets it run riot, creating the feel of a newspaper office, organised chaos at the best of times.”  I glanced at Show-Score, and I was a little surprised that the New York City mounting of Ink got an average score of 80 and that 84% of the reviews were positive.  Given how both Diana and I felt, that’s very high.)

Ink was commissioned by London’s renowned Almeida Theatre and débuted there on 27 June 2017 for a limited run.  The world première was directed by Rupert Goold (King Charles III, 2014 – also at Almeida, where he’s artistic director) with Bertie Carvel as Rupert Murdoch and Richard Coyle as Larry Lamb.  The production closed on 5 August and transferred to the Duke of York’s Theatre in the West End, opening on 19 September 2017, also for a limited run, closing on 6 January 2018.  The production was nominated as Best New Play for both a 2017 Evening Standard Award and a 2018 Olivier Award.  (Carvel won the Olivier Award for  Best Supporting Actor in a Play.) 

The play transferred to Broadway under the auspices of the Manhattan Theatre Club in 2019, starting previews on 2 April at MTC’s Broadway house, the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre on 47th Street, west of Broadway; the U.S. première of Ink opened on 24 April and Diana and I saw the 8 p.m. performance on Friday, 7 June.  Originally scheduled to close its limited run on 9 June, the production has been extended three times (as of 12 June), first to 16 June, then to 23 June, and finally to 7 July.  Jonny Lee Miller (2012 Olivier Award for Best Actor, shared with Benedict Cumberbatch, for Frankenstein; CBS’s Elementary, 2012-19) took over the role of Larry Lamb from Coyle; Carvel remains as Rupert Murdoch.  The rest of New York company is largely made up of U.S. actors.  Ink was nominated for six 2019 Tony Awards, including Best Play, and won for Best Performance by an Actor in a Featured Role in a Play (Carvel) and Best Lighting Design of a Play (Neil Austin); the play also received nominations for five 2019 Outer Critics Circle Awards, including Best New Broadway Play.

A description of the plot, such as it is, of Ink would be confusing and misleading, since the events that are depicted on stage aren’t literally what the play seems to be about.  Over two hours and 40 minutes (plus one intermission), Graham (Finding Neverland, 2014; Privacy, 2014) recounts Murdoch’s purchase of the failing Sun from Hugh Cudlipp (Michael Siberry), Chairman of the Mirror Group of newspapers, the holding company for the Daily Mirror and its companion papers, in January 1969, at a bargain-basement price.

                                                                                                            

Murdoch (Carvell), who’s 37 at the time the play begins, brings in Sir Alick McKay (Colin McPhillamy) to be to be his Deputy Chairman and hires 39-year-old Larry Lamb (Miller), the former northern editor of the Daily Mirror in Manchester, to be the first editor of the new Sun. 

Lamb, irate at having been passed over for promotion at the Mirror, where he’s a working-class Yorkshireman among Oxbridge toffs, demands a free hand if he takes the job, and Murdoch readily agrees.  In November, Lamb puts out the first edition of the Sun as a tabloid (like the Daily Mirror; the Sun had previously been a “stuck-up broadsheet,” like the London Times) and launches the new paper with radical changes in its format, coverage, and layout intended to appeal to a working-class readership.  The Daily Mirror was London’s best-selling daily paper at the time with 4.7 million readers and Murdoch makes it his priority, and therefore Lamb’s, for his new newspaper, with the nation’s lowest circulation—50,000 readers and going down—to catch up to the Daily Mirror’s circulation numbers within a year of his taking control.

The first part of the play is devoted to the obsessive make-over of the paper.  There’s a whirlwind of scenes—on film, it would be a montage of quick cuts—of his hiring writers and staff for the paper (“the spurned, the spited, the overlooked . . . a ship of undesirables,” in Murdoch’s words), holding brainstorming sessions to determine the kind of stories the new Sun will cover—such as sports, sex, crime, gossip, celebrities, the royals, and “the telly,” which, Lamb points out, people watch while most British papers ignore it as competition—and the best layout to catch the eye of the working man and woman.  Give them what they actually want, insists Lamb.  (The word for that is ‘pandering.’)

As act one unfolds, Lamb and photographer Beverley Goodway (Andrew Durand) shoot a topless Stephanie Rahn (Rana Roy) as the first “Page 3 Girl,” a regular feature of the Sun (which continued until 2015).  This episode is given greater prominence in Ink than any other aspect of the make-over, and it also gives Graham the opportunity to depict Murdoch’s discomfort with the gimmick as Lamb brushes his employer’s reservations aside.   As the act ends, the Sun is gaining on the Daily Mirror in circulation.  (In reality, the Sun didn’t catch up to the Mirror until 1978.)

The darker act two comprises the depiction of the paper’s coverage of one story, a gruesome crime saga that is close to home.  On 29 December 1969, Sir Alick’s wife, Muriel (Tara Summers), is kidnapped, mistaken for Anna Murdoch (Erin Neufer), Rupert Murdoch’s wife at the time.  Until this point, Sir Alick hasn’t been a major character in the play—and even through act two, his importance is down-played. 

The Sun’s sensational headlines on the front pages, reporting every grisly detail and presumption for the delectation of the readers, may even have hastened Lady McKay’s possible death.  Her body was never found, but the Sun reported that the authorities believed she was killed shortly after her abduction and her remains were fed to the pigs on the farm of the two kidnappers (a pair of Muslim Indo-Trinidadian immigrant brothers).  Graham’s Murdoch also makes ineffectual objections to covering this story, but Lamb argues that it’s what the Sun is meant to be.

Near the end of the play, Murdoch tells Lamb he’s on his way to New York.  “I’m thinking about buying a TV network over there,” he explains.  It may be the most ominous pronouncement Graham makes in Ink.

I can’t think of anything affirmative to say about the play or the production.  Ben Brantley was particularly high on the performances of the two leads in the New York Times (Carvel is “balletically precise” and Miller is “terrific”), but I was unimpressed, and in the case of Bertie Carvel, I found his performance of Rupert Murdoch oddly mannered, especially his voice.  It was either a strange casting choice (assuming that’s Carvel’s normal speaking voice—he’s often described in reviews as “chameleonic”) or a strange acting/directing decision (if it’s put on).  Both Diana and I had the same reaction.  The play opens in dim light and we were sitting above in the mezzanine, so we were looking down on the actors—that is, we couldn’t see the faces at that point, just the tops of heads.  When Carvel spoke, we both thought it was a woman on stage!

The play includes several elements of stylization, including the set (Bunny Christie, who also did the costumes), the lighting (Austin), and the fact that the actors break into song and dance for no apparent reason (Lynne Page is the choreographer and movement director and the sound design, including the period music selection, was by Adam Cork)—Ink’s not a musical—and in what’s supposed to be parts of the Sun newspaper offices, there’s an upright piano, complete with piano player (Kevin Pariseau, a member of the cast who also portrays a union worker in the pressroom and a TV interviewer), sitting down left.  (Don’t all newsrooms have pianos?  I have it on good authority that the New York Times has a baby grand.)

Anyway, that all smacks of stylization of some sort—non-Realism—but director Goold went with perfectly naturalistic performances from the cast.  That, aside from the odd break-out moments which seemed to have no dramatic or theatrical purpose, made Ink appear to be a straight history play about how Murdoch changed the face of newspapering, first in Britain and then in the rest of the world.  Except that that’s not really a two-hour-and-40-minute story, so there’s a lot of padding and very little revelation.  I mean, it’s not like no one knew what Murdoch did; it was no stealth mission!  

There are also a lot of actors (18, not counting understudies), including many who play several roles—so there are quite a few characters (22, plus “extras”).  Except for Murdoch and Lamb, however, none of them seems to have much to do.  We learn nothing about them as people—even Lamb and Murdoch—and they’re mostly there to do the newspaper work—there’s a linotypist, a printer, a copy boy, a photog, a few writers, and so on—but they aren’t characters in the drama, they’re employees of the paper (if you follow my distinction).  They don’t advance the plot, they get the paper out! 

That means there’s a lot of frenetic activity—the driving plot device is Murdoch’s vow for the Sun to outsell the Mirror within a year.  There are lots of scenes of layout changes, format changes, content changes—all to appeal to the working-class reader so it’s crass and low-brow, like Lamb’s invention of the Page 3 Girl, the topless woman in a photo that had no connection to any news story, just cheesecake).

All this activity takes place on a mountainous set that looks like a corner of an Aztec pyramid made of office furniture.  The desks, filing cabinets, work tables, and office chairs are all entirely naturalistic from the era of hot-lead typesetting, mostly gray metal and dark wood, but Christie has them stacked in receding levels up the up-stage right corner of the stage’s back wall.  The actors clamber up the stack—Lamb’s desk is at the very top level—and perform small scenes from there.  It’s like a monkey house at a zoo with a constructed “environment” for the specimens to caper on for our amusement.  

A relatively small space down-center and down-left is left free of clutter as an acting area (the piano is also located here) and a trap door with an elevator brings up set pieces for other locations such as the press room, a restaurant, and so on.   Behind all this is a wall of video screens that project bits of news stories, headlines, photos, and other visuals to underscore what’s happening in the script.  (The projection design is by Jon Driscoll.)

Austin’s film-noir lighting veers from dim and hazy (everyone smokes and there’s a bottle of booze—I imagine Scotch, given the play’s setting—is on every desk) to dark with bright spotlights on individual actors, like that opening scene I described earlier.  Like Christie’s scenic elements, her costumes are also utterly naturalistic and perfectly appropriate. 

Graham portrays Murdoch as a softie—he squirms at the Page 3 Girl feature and some of the coverage (such as “Knickers Week”), with Lamb as the guy who actually comes up with all the sleazy tactics that make the Sun a circulation giant (and simultaneously lowers the tone of newspapering on Fleet Street and beyond; as I reminded Diana, it led directly to Fox News, Sean Hannity, Alan Colmes, and Roger Ailes).  Murdoch’s conquest of Fleet Street is presented as a success story, not as a cautionary tale (though we may infer that meaning—especially when the newly minted press baron seems to foresee social media by predicting a world where consumers produce their own content and bids farewell to Lamb by telling him he’s off to New York because there’s a TV network there in which he’s interested.  (Rupert Murdoch purchased the Fox Broadcasting Company in 1986; in 1985, he bought an interest in 20th Century Fox; and launched Fox News in 1996.)

The problem is, I don’t buy it.  A man who did what Murdoch did could not have had such a delicate constitution and a media mogul who meddled so heavily in his outlets’ editorial policies and practices could not have been as hands-off as Ink makes him out to be.  I don’t buy it for a New York second!  One question I had after the play was how much, if any, of the script is based on research and fact and how much is sheer invention.  

In a YouTube interview on the Almeida website (which I transcribed myself), Graham addressed this matter, though not definitively.  “I love history.  I love the process of researching historical events, meeting . . . interviewing people from the past and finding my way structurally and narratively through . . . these periods is great fun,” said the playwright.  “I probably had about two, three weeks of intense research—memoirs, interviews, documents—and then I started structuring, I started plotting and writing.”  So he did consult sources, though he doesn’t specify whether they provided Murdoch’s exact words or his demeanor in any given conversation.  In addition, Graham said he talked “to some Fleet Street people who were there around at the time and got them to check certain facts . . . .”  Then the actors put their oars in, too.  They “did a lot of research without me and watched clips online and read autobiographies,” recounted the playwright—and then they took off on their own, turning the parts into “characters and not real people.”

Furthermore, though Graham insisted, “I think reality will always be more interesting than anything you can make up,” he acknowledged, “I’m a great believer that . . . audiences aren’t stupid, that they’re very sophisticated and they know that this is a fictionalized representation; it’s not a factual presentation of anything.”  When the unidentified interviewer asked about addressing characters like Rupert Murdoch, about whom audience members might have preconceived opinions, the dramatist replied:

Personally, I think it’s my job to humanize these people, even people we strongly disagree with or people, as you say, we might come with a huge amount of baggage or prejudice or assumptions about someone—especially someone like Rupert Murdoch or a newspaper like the Sun . . . .  So I do think it’s my job and I enjoy the side of the work which plays devil’s advocate with that and tries to come at things at a weird angle, or come at people from a different angle.  And, of course, ultimately, someone can—and probably should—write a play that really goes hard for Murdoch and calls him to account.  That’s not gonna be my play.  I have more interest in trying to understand what motivates him—his vulnerabilities, his weaknesses, his flaws, his strengths even: that to me is what excites me as a writer.

Dominic Cavendish, the reviewer for the London Telegraph, spoke of Graham’s “interweaving of fact and fiction” in telling the story of Rupert Murdoch and the Sun, but the playwright emphasized his commitment to factuality in writing Ink: “For this play, which is about how the truth can be weaponized and fictionalized for political gain, I felt a very keen responsibility to not misrepresent the truth,” he said in another interview in New York’s Back Stage trade paper. 

Irrespective of any of this, however, no one wrote about Murdoch as a sweet guy with no agenda.  (Brantley called him “Mephistopheles”—which would make Lamb Faust—though the Financial Times said “not quite.”)  He’s universally portrayed, even in Ink, as an outsider—an Australian in Britain, seen as an interloper in the Fleet Street old boys’ club, “ignored by his fellow newspaper barons in the leather chairs at the London Press Club, who mock ‘The Aussie Sheep Farmer’ behind his back.” 

His interest wasn’t in journalistic standards or accurate reportage, but in making a profit.  “The numbers are what matter,” says Murdoch in the play.  A TV interviewer in the play remarks, “The news business then, for generations seen as a noble pursuit, [is now] no different from that of hawking soap, or shaving cream on a market stall, it’s solely about shifting volume.”  Graham makes Murdoch out to be skittish, even prudish, when it comes to covering certain subjects, but he’s ravenous when it comes to selling papers.  I still wonder it that dichotomy is accurate. 

James Graham was born on 8 July 1982 (he’ll be 37 next month) and grew up in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, in northern England (coincidentally, less than 50 miles from the Yorkshire town in which Larry Lamb had been born and less than 70 miles from Manchester, where he’d been northern editor of the Daily Mirror).  The incipient playwright studied drama at the University of Hull in Yorkshire.  Aside from the Almeida Theatre, his work has been staged throughout the United Kingdom and around the world, at theatres including the Donmar Warehouse and the National Theatre in London; Clwyd Theatr Cymru in Wales; the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts; the Public Theater and, now, the Manhattan Theatre Club in New York City (the latter the playwright’s Broadway début). 

A cursory look at Graham’s oeuvre reveals that he often writes about politics and political issues in his plays and films.  Ink might seem to be an exception; even though Rupert Murdoch is well known today to use his media outlets to campaign vociferously for policies and candidates he supports—popular opinion is that the victory of the Conservative Party and the election of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in 1979 was greatly aided by Murdoch’s support and the endorsement of the Sun—the play doesn’t cover this aspect of the mogul’s rise to influence.  Graham has acknowledged, however, that part of his inspiration for writing Ink was his observation of the press coverage of, first, Brexit, which Murdoch backed, and then Donald Trump’s candidacy for President of the United States in 2015 and 2016.

(The Murdoch-owned New York Post endorsed Trump in the New York State Republican primary and, though it withheld its endorsement in the general election, the conservative tabloid gave the candidate pages of positive coverage throughout the campaign—and bashed his opponent, Sen. Hillary Clinton, as often as it could manage.  The Wall Street Journal, which Murdoch’s News Corp also owns, eschews political endorsements—it hasn’t endorsed a candidate since 1928—but it did generously cover Trump, a businessman, after all: the Journal’s target audience.)

Graham’s first professional play, Albert’s Boy, was produced in 2005 by the Finborough Theatre in London, where Graham became playwright-in-residence.  His first major play, This House, was commissioned in 2012 by the Royal National Theatre, where it was critically and commercially acclaimed, transferred to the larger Olivier Theatre, and was nominated for the Olivier Award for Best New Play.  This House, a play set in the latter half of the 1970s and depicting events surrounding the House of Commons, was revived in 2016 and ran for two years, first in the West End and then on a national tour.

In 2018, Graham won his first Olivier Award, for Labour of Love, the story of a Labour MP over 25 years in office, as best new comedy (Ink was nominated in the same year).  He wrote the book for the Broadway musical Finding Neverland (2014), and his 2014 play, Privacy, like Ink, came to New York City, produced by the Joseph Papp Public Theater at the Joseph Papp Public Theater in 2016.

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Graham’s debut feature film X+Y (renamed A Brilliant Young Mind) premiered in 2015, and he has written numerous British television dramas, including the TV films Coalition (which won the Royal Television Society award for Best Single Film; 2015) and Brexit: The Uncivil War, which aired on Channel 4 in 2019.

In June 2018, Graham was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in its 40 Under 40 initiative.  In January 2019, the writer’s life and work were the subjects of a documentary as part of the Imagine series on BBC One.  In May 2019, This House was voted Play of the Decade in Bloomsbury Publishing’s “60 Years of Modern Plays” public survey.

As I’ve indicated, Ink’s critical reception in London, both at the Almeida and then in the West End, was largely enthusiastic.  In New York, Show-Score (as I hinted above) showed that the press here was of a similar disposition.  I reported earlier that the site gave Ink an average rating of 80, based on a survey of 50 published reviews.  I also reported that 84% of the New York reviews were positive, but the rest of the breakdown, as of 14 June, was that 12% were mixed and just 4% were negative.  There were seven 95’s (amNewYork, New York Stage Review, and the U.S. edition of the Financial Times among them), Show-Score’s top score, followed by eight 90’s, including CurtainUp, Gotham Playgoer, and NY1 television news, among others.  The two low scores on the site were Time Out New York with a 40 and The Wrap with 45.  My round-up will cover 28 notices.

In amNewYork, Matt Windman described Ink as “a fast-paced and provocative thriller brimming with rowdy comic banter and prescient social commentary” and Goold’s production as “gripping.”  Windman reported that the “production moves fluidly and is consistently, engrossing, entertaining and disturbing.”  In the end, the amNY reviewer, whose notice was one of the highest scorers on Show-Score with a rating of 95, dubbed Ink, a “magnificent new English drama.”  Barbara Schuler wrote in her “Bottom Line” in Long Island’s Newsday: “A fascinating look at how Rupert Murdoch went about building his media empire.”  She described the play as “engrossing” and declared, “If ever a story was ripped from the headlines, it’s this one.”  Schuler pondered a question he found personally (and professionally) significant:

It’s challenging to review a play that lays bare the inner workings of your profession.  Will anyone care about the intricacies of coming up with the perfect front-page layout or the machinations of creating a lead printing plate for the nightly press run?  Turns out in the right hands, it’s all kind of fascinating, especially when you add in spot-on, mile-a-minute performances from Bertie Carvel . . . and Jonny Lee Miller . . . .  Besides, as the two men on a mission frequently point out, it’s a darn good story (that being the primary answer to the question we started with).

“The large cast, directed with an energizing touch of theatrical fantasy by Rupert Goold, does a fine job portraying the assorted editors and writers,” reported the Newsday reviewer, though she  found “their occasional breaking into song is a touch unrealistic in my world (unless you count the annual holiday party).” 

The Times’ Brantley prefaced his review with an portentous question: “Did you hear the one about the guy who sells his soul to the devil?  How about the story in which an entire country does the same thing?”  Assuaging his U.S. readers, “[D]on’t worry, uneasy Americans, it’s not about you,” the Timesman went on, “These cautionary tales intersect to highly invigorating effect in James Graham’s ‘Ink.’”  He felt that Goold staged the play “with vaudevillian flair and firecracker snap” that “turn[s] the cast into a (sometimes literal) conga line, wriggling to an infectious, forward-moving beat that obviates doubts and scruples.”  The Times review-writer found, “The largely American, multicast ensemble deploys varyingly confident British accents.  But it does well in sustaining the play’s propulsive momentum.” 

In New York’s Daily News, a paper from whom we haven’t heard much with respect to theater, Chris Jones wondered who Rupert Murdoch really is.  He proclaimed that “as they like to say at Fox News, the new Broadway play ‘Ink’ mostly reports the facts. You decide, dear reader, you decide.”  Jones added, “At least you will have fun doing the deciding” as he compared Ink with Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s Front Page (see my report of a 2016 revival, posted on 16 November 2016), noting both plays’ “humorous relish.”  He called Ink a “gloriously nostalgic catnip for a vanished era of newsprint,” which Goold “directed with palpable if unsubtle joy.”  Comparing Lamb to Icarus (the mythological Greek who flew too close to the sun with wax wings), the Daily News reviewer labeled Ink “a bit of a morality play.”  (In a compound error no one apparently caught in editing, Jones kept calling the playwright James “Gresham” and the director Rupert “Gould.”)

Johnny Oleksinski of the New York Post (owned by Rupert Murdoch, as Oleksinski disclosed, and awarded a score of 90 on Show-Score) called Ink an “exciting new play,” a “down-and-dirty dramedy,”  and “unexpectedly seductive.”  The Postman added that “nothing about” Ink “is ever less than rousing,” and the production “is hoisted even higher by director Rupert Goold, doing his best work since the similarly irreverent ‘King Charles III,’ by mixing in music and dance for a raging party vibe.”  In the end, Oleksinski concluded, “‘Ink’ is way more than just a bit of fun.”

In the U.S. edition of the Financial Times, another notice scored at 95, Max McGuinness asserted that Ink “evokes the demise of a deferential, collectivist social order and the emergence of a brash, individualistic culture epitomised by the rise of Margaret Thatcher.”  Dubbing the play a “political allegory” and “mesmerisingly accomplished,” it “is directed by Rupert Goold with characteristic razzmatazz.” 

Labeling Ink as “a big, loud, aggressively funny play that turns the newsroom clock back to 1969,” Terry Teachout of the Wall Street Journal (also owned by Murdoch) links it to the “newspaper movie [which] used to be an established genre in Hollywood, and a consistently popular one,” naming several classics from the ‘30s, ‘40s, and ‘50s.  The genre’s passé now for the most part (Teachout sort of ignores The Paper, 1994; Spotlight, 2015; The Post, 2017, and the granddaddy of recent newspaper films, All the President’s Men, 1976—plus a few others in the past 25 years), but the Journalist suggested that their passing is a good reason that “anyone who knows anything about the raffish history of print journalism will delight in James Graham’s ‘Ink.’”  Teachout reported that the play, “[s]taged at a headlong hurtle . . . and featuring excitingly raucous performances by [Bertie] Carvel and Jonny Lee Miller . . . ‘Ink’ moves at so brisk a gallop that the intermission break will catch you off guard.” 

Teachout had a similar question about the portrayal of Rupert Murdoch to mine:

It’s no secret that the real Mr. Murdoch (who is the executive chairman of News Corp, which owns both the Sun and this paper) is widely regarded by Britain’s chattering classes as the devil incarnate.  This makes it downright flabbergasting that Mr. Graham has portrayed him with seemingly genuine sympathy in “Ink.”  How is such a thing possible, especially given the fact that the British stage, like the American stage, is a monoculture in which pretty much everyone lists to the left?

The Journal’s review-writer’s explanation?

The answer is that “Ink” is not so much about politics, or even journalism, as it is about the British class system, and specifically about the proclivity of bowler-hatted toffs in old-school ties to sneer at the lesser breeds who read, write, edit and (ahem) publish tabloids. 

“That’s what makes ‘Ink’ so surprising,” affirmed Teachout:: “It cuts sharply across the lines of traditional politics, foreshadowing the 21st-century explosion of populist rage that is convulsing parties of the right and left.”  The actors, the reviewer reported, “generate enough energy among them to mostly overcome the structural weaknesses of ‘Ink,’ which succumbs to melodrama in the second act, followed by a coda whose sum-it-all-up sanctimony sits uneasily alongside the brash vitality of the first act.”  He concluded, “What we have here, then, is a refreshing piece of intelligent, mostly unpreachy entertainment, a commodity that’s grown steadily harder to find on Broadway in recent seasons.  Not only is ‘Ink’ fun, but it’ll make you think—if you let it.”

Christopher Kelly of the Newark Star-Ledger, called Ink an “exuberant and entertaining drama” on NJ.com and determined that it “does something very canny: it makes a largely liberal Broadway audience root for conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch.”  (Clearly it didn’t work for me!)  Kelly complained that the play’s “overlong and occasionally baggy, and its ultimate unwillingness to take a moral stand on its characters’ actions feels like a cop out.”  He continued, “As directed by Rupert Goold . . ., it’s tricked out with gimmickry that distracts more than it enhances—” wondering, “I’m really not sure, for instance, we need a quasi-musical number to show us how Lamb assembled his editorial team.”  On the other hand, the New Jersey reviewer found, “That ‘Ink’ keeps and at times rivets our attention is because . . .  it turns the details of the business world into the stuff of rip-roaring melodrama.” 

“Graham effectively turns the formation of the paper into a battle of working-class lads and lasses against the stuffy, champagne-liberal establishment,” David Cote characterized Ink in the New York Observer.  This, reported Cote, enables “the audience to suppress its collective gag reflex at the thought of rooting for Murdoch and his cronies.”  The production is “directed with nonstop gusto” and this all “makes for an entertaining first half,” but “the play grows moodier” after the Sun sees circulation success.  The Observer reviewer complained that “Graham churns out meaty dialogue and keeps things moving, but there’s a sense that he’s often rushing to check off the next journalistic milestone.”  He added, “The action seldom slows down long enough to dig into any of the characters’ back stories.”  In his final analysis, Cote found, “Still, due to Goold’s brassy, athletic staging and a fine ensemble, Ink is never boring.”  He concluded:

Still, too much of Ink wants to dazzle and seduce; it strenuously avoids passing judgement on what Murdoch’s revolution would bring about 50 years later, keeping its prime villain almost in shadow.  The cover grabs you with buzz words, grisly photos, and 72-point screaming headlines.  But turn the page, and you find yourself wanting more news, less flash. 

Calling Ink “exciting” in the New Yorker, Hilton Als demurred slightly and added that “more specifically,” it “should excite something in the audience, if only a greater understanding of how certain genres work, or don’t.”  The he complained that “‘Ink’ is your fairly standard slice-of-life drama, but one that’s been tricked out to feel more contemporary than it really is.”  Als concluded his opening statement by stating: “How the playwright, James Graham, and the director, Rupert Goold, achieved this effect accounts for what’s interesting about the nearly three-hour drama—and for why it fails.”  The New Yorker reviewer identified two “problems” with Ink; the first is that “it’s filled with allusions and references to the British character and news culture that don’t translate to the U.S.” and the second “is that Graham never really tells us who Murdoch is, so we’re left to rely on what we’ve read.”  Als wraps up his assessment of Ink by concluding:

Graham gets as close to his characters as he can, but those wily, bullheaded subjects weren’t fashioned from his bones.  Perhaps he’s too intelligent for them; his piece certainly builds nicely, weaving into a traditional narrative little asides about the show-business aspect of tabloid life.  One could make an easy argument for “Ink” as a treatise on the rotten rise of celebrity culture, but its intellectual properties aren’t that expansive.

On Vulture, the website for New York magazine, Sara Holdren felt that Ink serves as “an interesting . . . case study” of “self-made giants of the market.”  It “use[s] humorous, highly structured writing to pick apart the hubristic growth of a modern moneymaking empire” and is “unashamedly built to be [an entertainment].”  Holdren warned, however, that “that task can get easily sidetracked.”  She continued, though: “Ink, though it resists moralizing, is at least interested in asking moral questions,” adding, “And as directed with plenty of pop and fizz by Rupert Goold, and driven by the compelling performances of Bertie Carvel and Jonny Lee Miller, it’s both playful and thoughtful—not, perhaps, a kick-in-the-guts play, but an energetic, respectable handshake.”  Holdren felt that “Ink is perhaps on the back-heavy side, with all of the play’s weightiest, densest episodes shoved into Act Two”; the first half “is dedicated to the amusing, Ocean’s Eleven–like assembling of The Sun’s ragtag team.” 

When a show doesn’t know what it’s about, it starts asking itself existential questions,” cautioned Helen Shaw of Time Out New York, in the review that rated lowest (40) on Show-Score.  Shaw expanded on this point: “‘What makes a good story?’ a character might ask another character, portentously.  This is exactly the moment the theatergoer should start worrying.  The word story is to bad plays what the word family is to bad action films: a sign of vapidity taking itself seriously.”  In the play, the woman from TONY pointed out, the answer Lamb gives to that question is the journalistic standards, conventions which he and the Sun will pretty much ignore or distort; what Shaw’s answer was is: “A good dramatic story, though, has more than the newsroom basics.  It has pressure, argument, surprise, suspense.”  Then she asked, “So why is there no drama here?”  She explained that “although Graham labors hard to humanize Lamb with shadows of self-doubt, this psychological element is oversold and unconvincing, and we’re left with a long show about a foregone conclusion,” continuing:

Taken-from-the-record plays often have this problem: We know how things turned out.  We know what a Murdochian world looks like because we live in it, and once the show has answered the question of how did we get here (they did it to sell papers), there’s still two hours and 20 minutes to go.

“Director Rupert Goold knows that Ink needs ginning up, and boy, he ladles on the gin,” the TONY reviewer determined.  “This production is loud, and it’s lit like a rock show.  It has the chiaroscuro intensity of a C. S. Lewis morality play about the Devil.”  Shaw felt, “Goold may think he’s rescuing a dry procedural by turning it into hyperactive, overamplified children’s theater for adults, but he’s actually administering the killing blow.  His dynamic control is shot.” 

In the Hollywood Reporter, David Rooney used his “Bottom Line” to label Ink as “The Decline of Western Civilization for Dummies.”  He began his assessment of the play with a critique of the director’s style:

Rupert Goold is the king of bells and whistles.  The English showman rarely resists the urge to infuse a text with kinetic energy by drawing from his ample bag of dynamic stage tricks.  That can work to a production’s advantage . . . .  Elsewhere, though, the gilded Goold touch can expose the shortcomings of a mediocre play.

This, Rooney contended, is the case with Ink.  The HR reviewer characterized the play as “basically a semi-dramatized Wikipedia page with two satisfyingly fleshed-out characters in a crowded field, and two correspondingly compelling performances competing for attention with a load of directorial froufrou.”  Rooney, however, does acknowledge, “For anyone with a nostalgic interest in the bygone days of print journalism, there’s lots to enjoy in Goold’s imaginative presentation of the nuts-and-bolts process of putting out a daily paper. . . .  Everything from editorial content to headline-writing to layout and even distribution is depicted with rollicking energy and humor.” 

The review-writer also found, “There’s entertainment value in the glee with which Larry and his team rip into the noble traditions of establishment print journalism” and “Goold stages it all with a putting-on-a-show adrenaline rush, even if it’s somewhat undercut by lack of character shading in the newsroom figures.”  He admitted, “The goal of hurdling the Mirror’s circulation lead in a year provides the drama with a ticking clock.  But the overlong play spends too much time spinning its wheels.”  Then Rooney affirmed, “The juicy element that finally livens up the sluggish second act is a shocking development likely to be unfamiliar to most American audiences.”  

He was referring to  the coverage of the kidnapping of Muriel McKay, which “also strikes at the dramatic crux of the matter—how uncomfortable ethical questions were brushed aside for the sake of sales figures.”  He asserts, though, that “this is also where the structural imbalance in Graham’s writing becomes problematic,” explaining that “going from such a chilling crime to a drawn-out scene agonizing over the decision to introduce topless ‘Page 3 girls’ just seems anticlimactic.”  Rooney concluded by asserting that “Graham’s storytelling instincts too often get dulled here, and Goold’s frantically busy direction can’t disguise that.”

Frank Rizzo labeled Ink “[g]arish, lurid and brash” in Variety, pronouncing the plays “the theatrical equivalent of its subject.”  In explanation, Rizzo wrote, “Like the tabloid, it feels unsubstantial, rushed and icky.”  The review-writer warned that

those expecting a psychological study of a titan, deep analysis of the marketplace, or personal stories resulting from an industry’s seismic shift will find the play lacking, as it favors boisterous pronouncements and mythologizing over the human touch.  Think of it as “Network” for ink-stained wretches.

“‘It’s all about a good story,’” reported Rizzo in Murdoch’s words, “and it’s a dandy one here that whizzes to its conclusion in a staging directed with deadline urgency by Rupert Goold.”  He continued, “In the early scenes there’s a ‘Front Page’ energy, verve and cheek to proceedings,” and found, “At first the David-and-Goliath story is fun to watch as it unfolds, upsetting the tut-tutting press powers.”  But then, “the underdog turns rabid, [and] James Graham’s play comes up short, and instead of digging deeper into the story, Goold and company simply crank up the speed and volume.” 

In the electronic media, things were much the same as the print outlets.  On NY1, the 24-hour all-news channel for Spectrum cable subscribers, Roma Torre asserted that Ink “makes for a fascinating study” of Rupert Murdoch’s “earliest days as a wannabe newspaper publisher.”  Torre, whose notice scored a 90, Show-Score’s second-highest rating for Ink, described the play as “a sprawling, heady, hilarious David and Goliath story that may just make you root for the giant.”  Graham “resists turning Murdoch into a villain,” explained Torre.  “Rather he portrays the mogul as a smart businessman with a chip on his shoulder and a ruthless underdog streak.”  As for the production, director Goold’s “vision for the play is an inspired antic Marx Brothers style romp.” 

On WNYC radio, an outlet of National Public Radio, Jennifer Vanasco reported that Ink is “beautifully directed,” though it’s also “often slow.”  The play “gets at something important: Is there a way of overturning the old order which, as Murdoch says, is designed by people in power to keep them there,  without devolving into a fascist populism?  ‘Ink’ doesn't have the answers, but it sure asks the questions.”  Vanasco felt that Ink “never explores ‘the why’”—the last of the five W’s of journalism—“either: It never examines why Murdoch does what he does.  Instead, it . . . explore[s] the moral lines journalists face and show what happens when they cross them.” 

Robert Hofler on The Wrap, the website that got Show-Score’s second-lowest rating (45), begins his notice with a cautionary statement:

If you don’t already appreciate “Citizen Kane,” the unnecessary first act of “Ink” will make you marvel at Orson Welles’ economy and wit.  Kane’s creation of a tabloid is fun, insightful and, most important, Welles tells the story quickly.  Graham, on the other hand, shows Lamb handpicking each staff member, and each portrait of these hardened journos is a cliché.

“Much more tiresome,” added Hofler, “is Graham’s need to show how newspapers were printed in 1969.”  Even Goold’s “flashy musical-comedy direction can’t disguise the fact that there’s no drama in the first act of ‘Ink.’”  Hofler continued: “Act 2 is an improvement because a story finally emerges . . .  and Lamb plays it up big.”  The reviewer concluded: “To use a newspaper term, ‘Ink’ is a puff piece.”  Calling the play “frequently exciting, if overlong,” Samuel L. Leiter labeled Goold’s staging “strikingly distinctive” on Theatre’s Leiter Side.  Leiter included, “Ink overextends itself, and could use some editorial trimming.  That, however, is not to deny that it remains “a good fuckin’ story.”

On CurtainUp, Elyse Sommer characterized Ink in another 90-rated review, as “one of the most entertaining and fun to watch plays that London has sent our way.”  She affirmed, “To his great credit, the playwright has managed . . . to tell a ripping good newspaper story” and, continued Sommer, “Thanks to . . . Rupert Goold, . . . [the] play has been staged with stupendous originality and style and is performed with gusto by a large cast.”  The CU reviewer also found, “Carvel's interpretation” of Murdoch “is indeed fascinating and fun to watch.” 

Mark Shenton of New York Theatre Guide declared Ink “a stunning achievement, both in riveting playwriting from Graham and thrilling stagecraft from Goold,” earning his review a 95 from Show-Score, its highest rating for the play.  Shenton reported that “the cinematic dynamism and propulsion that each provide turns a play about a pivotal moment in the history of British newspaper journalism into something akin to a thriller.”  Playwright Graham “expertly marshals the human drama behind these headlines—and it is properly galvanised [sic] by a pair of towering performances” from Carvel and Miller, who are “both spellbinding.”  Shenton ended by proclaiming that Ink “makes for top theatre.”

JK Clarke on Theater Pizzazz warned potential theatergoers that “while the details of the story may be salacious, they are not as shocking or revelatory as the playwright would have you believe.”  He suggested, “Had Ink been written/produced in the 1980s it might have been more compelling.  Tabloids were going full speed and slander was considered part of the game . . . .  But the advent of the Internet has made dirty journalism seem quaint.”  The NYTG reviewer reported, “Ink is blessed with a look and feel that give it a burst of newsroom energy without it being drab.”  Then he complained, “But Goold’s staging is often awkward, with prolonged darkened breaks between scenes or odd dance numbers that didn’t make sense in the context of this play,” adding, “Furthermore, there were scenes that could have easily been trimmed or cut to reduced [sic] the overlong two hours and 45 minute run time.”  Clarke acknowledged, however, “The play is ultimately rescued by Graham’s sharp, crisp dialog performed by a terrific cast” and concluded, “Overall, it makes for a compelling and entertaining night out at the theater that may or may not teach you a thing or two.”

On the Daily Beast, Tim Teeman described Ink as “uneven, intriguing . . . with two excellent performances by Jonny Lee Miller and Bertie Carvel.”  Teeman also felt that “it also seeks to impose a measured, piquant view upon its own sepia frame.”  The DB reviewer was surprised that “that this play is more celebration than moral inquisition.”  Confessing that he worked for Murdoch’s Times of London, Teeman seems to regret that the play “doesn’t put Murdoch on trial” and that “it is a mainly sympathetic origin story.”  The review-writer pointed out, “The first half of Ink is romp-ish; a kind of ‘making the band’ as Lamb assembles his troupe of launch issue journalists.”  The second half of the play is “overwrought, . . . constructed around two early Sun flashpoints,” the Page 3 Girls and the kidnapping of Muriel McKay.  The latter event, Teeman found, “adds another structural instability to the play itself, which up to this point has not focused on Alick McKay or his wife—so why should we care?”  Both these aspects of the play “are presented as telling moral quandaries, but come across as more convenient plot padding.”

Fern Siegel dubbed Ink “a fast-paced chronicle of ambition and anger” on TheaterScene.com, “a nasty foreshadowing of what’s to come.”  Graham’s play is “a compelling, even frightening tale of anarchy and mission, but once its intentions are clear, it’s less a commentary and more first-year bio.”  Siegel found that Goold “is excellent at creating an upbeat, celebratory mood in act one” and she praised Page’s choreography, Christie’s set and costumes, Austin’s lighting, Cork’s sound, and Driscoll’s projections which “greatly enhance the experience”; Miller “is exciting to watch.”  In conclusion, Siegel thought, “It’s amazing audiences aren’t screaming stop the presses!”

“Undeniably entertaining and unapologetically theatrical, Ink slaps a new headline on an old chestnut,”  asserted Zachary Stewart on TheaterMania, continuing with the question, “but will its viewers emerge from the darkness . . . enlightened about a process that still blindsides so many?”  Stewart characterized the “jittery drama” thus:

Much of Graham’s restless script plays out like every American sports movie from the past half-century: An aggrieved but talented coach assembles a ragtag team of misfits that, through unconventional methods, improbably comes from behind to win the championship. . . .   Broadway audiences might roll their eyes at this formula, but it constitutes a powerful and dangerous myth—the kind that destroys industries and topples governments.

Goold’s production “is unsubtle and gets the point across,” asserted Stewart.  “The production is the real star,” declared the TM reviewer, naming the entire design team for compliments.  “This is theater for the age of Twitter, in which there is always something shiny and outrageous coming down the feed,” added the review-writer.  Stewart characterized Ink as “a timely, if not particularly original, new play.  That’s fine: Some stories bear repeating until we finally hear them.”

James Wilson of Talkin’ Broadway labeled Ink “dazzling and gripping” and “considers the collateral damage of” Murdoch’s “philosophy” of giving the readers what they want and ultimately letting them produce their own content.  “Unfortunately,” Wilson found, “the play stumbles somewhat in the second act as it pursues the ramifications of this precis.  The narrative gets bogged down with a bit too much moralizing.”  Otherwise, “Ink is crackling good theatre.  It is a smart, expertly constructed play and infused with rapid-fire dialogue reminiscent of a 1930s comedy.”  Under Goold’s direction, “the production is stunningly theatrical.  In addition to the excellent ensemble of actors, there are eye-popping visuals by a team of designers.” 

(Just a note of congrats for Wilson.  Among all the other reviews I read, most writers compared Murdoch and Lamb to Mephistopheles and Faust or a pair of Machiavellis.  David and Goliath came up, but that was for the Fleet Street classists and Murdoch-the-Outsider.  Wilson was the only reviewer I saw who used Sweeney Todd, that other demonic denizen of Fleet Street, and Mrs. Lovett for his analogy.  Not inaptly, either.)

Once again, New York Stage Review posted two notices.  Elysa Gardner stressed “Graham’s sharp, rapid-fire dialogue” and “Goold’s characteristically flashy direction (a good fit for the subject matter).”  Praising the “superb cast,” NYSR Writer A concluded, “If it’s too late to kill the beast Murdoch has nourished over decades, Ink at least encourages us to reflect on its growth—and, if we’re fair, our own accountability in that.”

In the other NYSR review, which was another of Show-Score’s 95’s, Steven Suskin asked, “Can Graham, and director Rupert Goold, expect us to root for [Murdoch]?”  Suskin decided, “No, they don’t expect us to; they more or less force us to.”  The playwright, observed Suskin, “is interested only in the beginnings, and it makes a roisterous tale.”  NYSR Writer B labeled Graham’s play “spectacularly dynamic” and Goold’s “production team is all-round superb.”  At the end of the play, Murdoch tells Lamb, “It’s a good story.  People like stories.” Suskin affirmed, “It is, and we do.”

On TheaterScene.net (not to be confused with TheatreScene.com, quoted above), David Kaufman dubbed Ink a “smart new play” which “establishes its sly sense of humor in the . . . opening scene, when Lamb asks Murdoch if he likes ‘Rules’ and Murdoch replies, ‘So long as I’m the one making them,’ only for Lamb to say that he’s referring to the oldest restaurant in London, called ‘Rules’ where they’re having dinner.”  Kaufman cautioned readers, “Despite its concerns with newspapers and newsrooms, Ink is nothing like other journalism plays, such as The Front Page”—a play to which many other reviewers compared Ink.  “Graham’s otherwise realistic script takes on elements of performance art whenever director Rupert Goold has his many players . . . suddenly dancing with choreographed movements.”  The TS.net reviewer reported in his final assessment, “In the final analysis, Ink is too swift and too slick for its own good—or should I say, for our good?”  He complained, “Even if you know some of the details it traffics in, they zoom by at such a rapid clip, that it’s sometimes hard to follow.  Director Goold is to be faulted for the pace, no less than the playwright, Graham.”  Kaufman admitted that “some of [the play] was lost on this particular reviewer.”