[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.)
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.
.
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.”
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.”
