Review: Smudged ‘Ink’ Benefits from Strong Direction in Round House, Olney Co-Production
By D.R. Lewis
September 6, 2023
“I just want something loud,” now-infamous media mogul Rupert Murdoch advises editor Larry Lamb in Ink, James Graham’s dramatic recounting of the Australian businessman’s purchase of a UK tabloid, playing through September 24 at Round House Theater in a co-production with Olney Theatre Center. Under the strong direction of Olney Artistic Director Jason Loewith, the production delivers on volume, despite the play’s lack of substance. Though thoroughly reporting the who, what, where, when and how, Ink never fully makes the case for why this story deserves a front-page spread.
In Graham’s sprawling text set in late-1960s England, a mid-career Murdoch purchases the failing Sun from publishers of The Daily Mirror, the largest of the country’s newspapers. After recruiting respected journalist Larry Lamb as editor and a string of veteran reporters around Fleet Street (in a nicely staged scene straight out of the Ocean’s film franchise) to staff the paper, Murdoch delivers another directive: surpass The Mirror’s circulation within one year. In pursuit of this seemingly impossible goal, an increasingly ruthless Lamb appeals to his readers’ most base instincts, peddling sex, crime, and irreverence to sell millions of papers.
Having premiered in London in 2017 ahead of a 2019 Broadway run, Ink attempts to assert itself among those stories that have become part of the American newspaper drama tradition, dating as far back as Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s The Front Page in 1928. Among those most venerated based-on-a-true-story works are All The President’s Men, Spotlight, and, most recently, The Post, detailing the drama surrounding the Watergate break-in, child sex abuse in the Catholic Church, and Katharine Graham’s decision to publish the Pentagon Papers, respectively. But whereas those properties successfully illustrate the gravity and impact of their character’s actions, Ink makes a shaky case for why Murdoch’s purchase of The Sun changed the world. Obviously, the success of The Sun further deepened Murdoch’s pockets and influence. And any engaged person can draw their own conclusions as to what the blueprint of Murdoch and Lamb’s transformation of The Sun has meant for America’s information landscape. But for Graham’s nearly three-hour saga to make only passing allusion to Murdoch’s plans to expand to America, and in the final minute of the play no less, felt like a loss. Rather than presenting a world-changing origin story, the play delivers something closer to a British buddy-comedy peppered with fleeting dramatic interludes and half-asked moral questions. Of a story that may have deserved a longform investigative exposé, Graham delivers a backpage puff piece.
Even so, Loewith should be commended for elevating the material with an entertaining production. Cody Nickell commands the stage as Lamb, never allowing the audience to doubt that, despite occasional orders from Andrew Rein’s whiny Murdoch, he is at the helm of the newspaper and the performance. Nickell is supported by a team of actors who play a staff of chain-smoking reporters and technicians with uniform aplomb. And in playing the story’s presumed antagonist, though surely not its primary villain, Craig Wallace continues his long tradition of being both a moving and assuring presence onstage.
The performers are primarily draped in the standard gray, black, and blue suits of mid-century businessmen, but costume designer Debra Kim Sivigny takes advantage of any opportunity to add color and vibrance when possible. For a photo shoot that leaves two young women to embody the spirits of the Labour Party and the Tories, Sivigny goes all out with white gogo boots, sequined dresses, and delightfully silly headwear. These splashes of color stand out against Tony Cisek’s charcoal stage, which both invokes the foggy dreariness of London’s narrowest streets and provides Loewith with a foundation for continuous movement in the form of a turntable. Minjoo Kim nicely alternates between the bright lights of a newsroom and the dimness of those smoke-filled clubs of years gone by, and Mike Tutaj’s projections provide additional depth and dimension to Cisek’s canvas.
Loewith smartly makes up for the material by borrowing the characters’ inclination to move full-steam ahead and committing fully. Several sequences, including the airtight depiction of the many steps required to get a newspaper to print, are mesmerizing. Though quiet moments are few and far between, despite the play’s length, the production’s pacing does not leave audiences feeling exhausted. Rather, by driving the drama continuously, Loewith keeps audiences engaged and even the most trite bits of dialogue are quickly forgotten.
Producing Ink in the Washington area, which is home to so many politically-oriented and media-savvy people, is a bold move, but perhaps a safe one, given the play’s firm reliance on facts and timelines, rather than meaningful extrapolation. Even so, this production is an encouraging early offering in the fall season and a strong showing from both of the producing theaters. After the lights come up, Washington audiences may wax nostalgic about ink-stained fingers and a time when dozens of newspapers clamored for circulation in the millions. Regardless, Ink is more often clickbait than hard-hitting material.
Ink, written by James Graham, directed by Jason Loewith, and co-produced by Round House Theatre and Olney Theatre Center runs through September 24 at Round House Theatre, 4545 East-West Highway, Bethesda, MD. Tickets are available by calling 240-644-1100, ordering online at RoundHouseTheatre.org, or visiting the box office.
The cast of Ink at Round House Theatre. Co-produced with Olney Theatre Center. Photo by Margot Schulman Photography.