A play for today from yesterday’s news
Boy, does the blazingly talented James Graham have an eye for a good story. The hotshot who, with This House, gave us the inside scoop on the machinations of the parliamentary whip offices during the fraught mid-seventies, has set more real-life people on stage with his latest play, looking at the 1969 re-birth of
The Sun under Rupert Murdoch. This was, he argues during a rattling good evening, a decisive moment for British journalism and our culture, blowing the cobwebs off a Fleet Street grown dusty and fusty but also ushering in something dangerous, and even inhumane, in the rush to be bigger, brighter and shift more copies than the rest of the pack.
The most eye-catching fascination of this interweaving of fact and fiction, though, lies in its daring to put the most powerful media player on the planet under the spotlight – and show him when he was just starting out.
Will there come a night at the Almeida (or in the West End transfer that must, surely, beckon) when Bertie Carvel, entrusted with incarnating this mogul-in-the-making, looks out into the audience and catches sight of a well-known bespectacled face peering intently back at him?
The action begins with the moment Murdoch, having snapped up the ailing Sun broadsheet, approaches under-promoted Yorkshireman Larry Lamb, rescuing him from the regions with the offer of editorship. Far from being smugly satirical and yah-boo, the depiction of the Australian interloper is finely sketched. Carvel, although surprisingly under-twanged in terms of Aussie accent, cuts a dapper but hunched, scrutinisingly intense and diffident figure. There’s a slithery hint of the reptilian but also a burning, beguiling passion for a new way of doing things: holding power to account, embracing social change, ending post-war paternalism and puritanism. A coup. “There’ll be a lot of blood,” Richard Coyle’s manfully serious Lamb advises. “I hope so,” his boss replies.
What then follows, aside from showing the riveting nuts and bolts of how the tabloid was first put together (and nearly fell apart under the stresses of technical meltdowns, union jobsworths and very raw recruits), is a cautionary, nigh-on Faustian tale as frantic but fun brain-storming sessions throw up outlandishness as the new norm. Obsessed with boosting circulation figures ever higher to outstrip the Daily Mirror – causing condescension to slide entertainingly into consternation on “The Street” – Lamb (who died in 2000) turns wolf in ways that startle even his erstwhile sheep-farmer master.
First, there’s the shameless sensationalising of the saga involving the (fatal) hostage-taking of Muriel Mckay, wife of Murdoch’s deputy chairman, Alick Mckay. The insinuation, made visually explicit by dark enveloping stains behind Bunny Christie’s mountainous set of stacked desks and grotty filing cabinets, is that Lamb didn’t just have ink on his hands. And while old Fleet Street was no paradise, was something – that elusive thing, the soul? – not lost in the arrival of the page three stunna, with which the play pointedly culminates?
The script contains barely a dull line, and Rupert Goold – directing the finest thing at the Almeida since King Charles III – ensures there’s no let-up in interest or intrigue even as the hacks yak-i-di-yak. There’s a sinuous quality to the ensemble work, with Swinging Sixties couplings in the noirish shadows and outbreaks of tongue-in-cheek cabaret, too. The production also revels in the hallowed sound of those old presses pounding away, the men (it was mainly men, albeit with salty dashes of increasingly forthright women) going into mock-tribal dances of ecstasy before their all-powerful god.
Once again finding a play for today in what looked like yesterday’s news, Graham has surely penned a super, soaraway smash.
Until Aug 5. Tickets: 020 7359 4404; almeida.co.uk