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Ink Captures a Reputation That Won’t and Shouldn’t Rub Off

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For anyone who’s had occasion to wonder if Fox News ever employed anyone who believed what they were doing was, in fact, journalism, Ink, a thrilling account of the British newspaper wars of the late 1960s and ’70s that turned future Fox News founder Rupert Murdoch into an international power broker, answers that question with a resounding “sort of.” 

Murdoch was not yet a global supervillain in 1969, when he purchased the ailing “social radical middle class” newspaper The Sun. The Australian expat, who’d fancied himself a socialist during his years at Oxford, was merely an opportunist. He’d expanded the media empire he’d inherited from his father, acquiring the power to move and shape politics. As he approached his 40th birthday, he was eager to repeat that success in the much more competitive market of Great Britain. He hired brash editor Larry Lamb away from The Daily Mail and gave him a year to best The Mirror, England’s most-read newspaper, which was outselling The Sun sixfold. 

Lamb quickly hit upon the strategy of having The Sun abandon even the pretext of public service, revamping its coverage to emphasize TV, sports, contests, giveaways, and lurid accounts of true crime. When the latter interest appeared to inspire a horrifically violent act against the spouse of one of his own staffers, the recounting of which occupies most of Ink’s second act, Lamb, shaken but unbowed, added another ingredient to the list: boobs. The Sun’s Page Three, featuring a topless female model each day, became a signature part of the paper that would aid Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s rise to power a decade later. Playwright James Graham imagines a weirdly resonant coda between Lamb and Stephanie, the model to whom he has offered the opportunity to disrobe for public consumption. Awesta Zarif, the actor who plays the model, isn’t as convincing as veteran player Cody Nickell, who plays Lamb, but the scene still effectively foreshadows all the other compromises to come. Nickell’s Lamb seems almost apologetic when he tells his subordinate that if she doesn’t go along, someone else will. 

The Ink on stage at Round House is a co-production with Olney Theatre Center, and it’s Olney artistic director Jason Loewith who has assembled the cast of ringers that bring emotional conviction—and English accents of highly variable quality—to the piece’s grimy ’70s milieu. Andrew Rein, who plays the young Murdoch as a sort of impish miscreant rather than a Machiavellian schemer, is new to D.C. audiences, but the other standouts in the large company are all familiar favorites. Nickell’s well-honed brew of smarm punctuated at irregular intervals by fits of conscience and suppressed integrity makes him a compelling and believable Lamb. Maboud Ebrahimzadeh, Michael Glenn, Kate Eastwood Norris, Chris Genebach, Todd Scofield, and Round House honcho Ryan Rilette form a lived-in ensemble that makes you enjoy the camaraderie of a staff working towards a seemingly admirable goal—show those do gooder snobs what’s what—even as you know where their dissolute approach to the news business will lead. 

Graham’s script is rich in revelatory details, like how The Sun kept costs down by printing father outside of London than its competitors, which meant an evening deadline of 8:10 p.m.—too early for “footie scores.”  But it’s also sophisticated enough to make you cheer these rascals on, and to root against Craig Wallace’s pearl-clutching Mirror publisher Hugh Cudlipp. (“Maybe there’s something in this … fun,” Cudlipp sniffs as he’s presented with an alarming sales report.) His insistence that newspapers should stand for something more noble than just selling newspapers is borne out by history, but in Graham’s telling, it’s also boring. He’s challenging us to outthink our emotional reflexes, probably because it’s been demonstrated again and again that our feelings, not our thoughts, govern how we do most things, including how we vote. 



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