Ink: Rupert at the Round House

James Graham's play, Ink, traces the first year of Rupert Murdoch's campaign to conquer the British media world. It begins with his hiring Larry Lamb, an overlooked editor whose Yorkshire background apparently prevented him from scaling the climb to the highest media editorial aeries in London. The play shows the callow Australian seeking to transplant his method for building an editorial behemoth Down Under. 

Murdoch mouths lines about giving people what they want, making newspapers fun, and being a disrupter--in this case of the Establishment which dominated the British media. Lamb proceeds to hire the most able people he knows to grow The Sun from a minor broadsheet to the highest-circulation paper in the world, now as a tabloid. It's sex, scandal, and giveaways all round.

We get an inkling of how dangerous Murdoch will be (and now has been, at 90) to our society and democracy. He gradually insinuates his antilabor, pro-Tory beliefs into the paper. He urges Lamb to break out of all traditional journalistic guidelines and then disclaims responsibility when things blow up. But like him or not, we see how he proceeded to take over The Times [London], The New York Post, and The Wall Street Journal, while creating the Fox network and other TV channels worldwide.

The acting by all the players is excellent; it's hard to single any one or two out because the ensemble works beautifully. However, Craig Wallace as the reigning media monarch dethroned by Murdoch is superb; his versatility was demonstrated when I saw him as Louis Armstrong a few years ago at the Mosaic Theater Company at the Atlas Performing Arts Center.

This show runs longer than the specified two-and-one-half hours (with intermission). It's a co-production of Round House and the Olney Theater Company. Before the performance on Sept. 2, a panel moderated by the Post's Peter Marks considered the implications of Murdoch on both the media and democracy. The outstanding contributions were made by Michael Steele, now a commentator on MSNBC but former Republican National Chair and Lieutenant Governor of Maryland. 

My major difference with the panelists, particularly Jummy Olabangi of NBC4, was their acceptance of the idea that those who manage local TV news perform a largely objective service of presenting fact-based news. Their coverage, in my view, focuses principally on crime and creates an environment where one might conclude that crime is more rampant than ever, with consequent political demands for more stringent administration of justice. Murders have gone up in D.C., but as with other metro areas, crime as a whole has declined. 

The play moves nicely with good backdrops of headlines and sets focusing on adjoining multi-desk newsrooms and conversations  of two at fancy dinner tables. The first act focuses on the process by which The Sun builds up its circulation and the second act examines the results. All in all, it was a rewarding theatrical evening.