Boisterous fun in The Sun – but some of the fizzing banter needs honing: PATRICK MARMION reviews Ink as it hits the West End
Ink (Duke of York’s Theatre, London)
Verdict: Boisterous fun in The Sun
How we love to hate The Sun newspaper; and what fun it is to tut-tut over it in James Graham’s boisterous play first seen at North London’s boutique Almeida Theatre in June this year.
It’s about the re-birth of The Sun in 1969 under the ownership of then little known Rupert Murdoch, and it’s stuffed with lurid stories, colourful comment, tasty gossip and disreputable gags.
Told in a steady flow of muscular expletives typical of the trade, the action covers the first tumultuous year of the paper’s re-launch in the late Sixties, after it was bought for a song from Mirror Group newspapers and turned by editor Larry Lamb into the swashbuckling red top it is today.
There’s a memorable turn from Bertie Carvel as a lean, hunched, floppy-fingered Murdoch
Richard Coyle (Larry Lamb) and Justin Salinger (Brian McConnell)
Graham packs a lot in from the lobster dinner when Murdoch appointed Lamb, to Lamb’s gathering a team of leathery hacks as Fleet Street’s answer to the Magnificent Seven.
After the interval we get the distressing news of the kidnap of Muriel McKay (wife of The Sun’s deputy chairman Alick McKay) – the story that almost sank the paper - before moving on to Page 3 girl Stephanie Rahn, whose boobs finally won Lamb his circulation war.
Rupert Goold dresses it all up in a dark and murky, yet grubbily exuberant production. To scenes of soul-searching on church pews, he adds conga lines of formation song and dance.
As well as a bawdy sequence re-enacting Sun headlines as seaside postcards, we have a live-action demonstration of how the old hot metal presses used to work, making the show informative as well as raucous.
Pearl Chanda as Stephanie Rahn, whose Page 3 boobs finally won Lamb his circulation war
One of the joys of working in a newspaper is the fizzing banter, but some of it here needs honing.
I’m still trying to work out what Murdoch meant when he chastises Lamb, saying: ‘you don’t believe in anything you can’t get ink on your hands from’.
And there are some wince-making anachronisms, with talk of ‘empowering’ readers and being on ‘the wrong side of history’.
Graham would have been better off sticking to the tabloid vernacular of the day.
Richard Coyle’s Lamb cuts a slightly morose figure, but there’s a memorable turn from Bertie Carvel as a lean, hunched, floppy-fingered Murdoch.
With great support from Justin Salinger as crime reporter Brian McConnell, and Sophie Stanton as women’s editor Joyce Hopkirk, Graham’s play is saucy fun but could use even more of The Sun’s proletarian swagger.
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