Ink
Opening Night: April 24, 2019
Closing: June 23, 2019
Theater: Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
TWO MEN. ONE PAPER. HISTORY IN THE PRINTING. It’s 1969 London. The brash young Rupert Murdoch (Bertie Carvel) purchases a struggling paper, The Sun, and sets out to make it a must-read smash which will destroy – and ultimately horrify – the competition. He brings on rogue editor Larry Lamb (Jonny Lee Miller) who in turn recruits an unlikely team of underdog reporters. Together, they will go to any lengths for success and the race for the most ink is on! Inspired by real events and a recent hit in London’s West End, James Graham’s electrifying new play comes to Broadway in the exhilarating Almeida Theatre production, directed by Rupert Goold.
BUY TICKETSREAD THE REVIEWS:
April 24, 2019
So how will history judge Rupert Murdoch, of Fox News fame? As a devil from Down Under who trashed august journalistic institutions, made a mockery of the phrase “fair and balanced,” unleashed the kind of wild and reckless populism that elected Donald J. Trump, built the Brexit torture chamber, and might just kill intelligent democracy? Or as a populist mastermind who could see the cracks in the walls of the liberal elite’s country clubs, who realized great storytelling always requires distinct heroes and villains, who knew one guy’s fact always is another guy’s fiction, and who figured out long before the other dumb media titans that user-generated content and “Five hot things!” was far more profitable than the tortured copy and long sentences favored by pontificating columnists and critics? Well, as they like to say at Fox News, the new Broadway play “Ink” mostly reports the facts. You decide, dear reader, you decide. At least you will have fun doing the deciding.
READ THE REVIEW
April 24, 2019
Reflections on the heyday of scandalous Fleet Street likely won’t stir Broadway audiences with the same vigor that roused the West End when Ink debuted there in 2017. Little matter. James Graham’s play is so well-crafted that not knowing your Sun from your Mirror is a fairly minor hindrance. Opening tonight in a Manhattan Theatre Club production at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, the fact-based play, starring a ferocious Jonny Lee Miller (Broadway’s After Miss Julie, TV‘s Elementary) and, in a role that won him a 2018 Olivier Award, Bertie Carvel, chronicles the wild, woolly days of a young Rupert Murdoch and the newspaperman who helped him reshape Britain’s stodgy, moralistic press into something completely different.
READ THE REVIEW
April 24, 2019
Did you hear the one about the guy who sells his soul to the devil? How about the story in which an entire country does the same thing? These cautionary tales intersect to highly invigorating effect in James Graham’s “Ink,” which opened on Wednesday night at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater. And don’t worry, uneasy Americans, it’s not about you. Except that it is. Directed with vaudevillian flair and firecracker snap by Rupert Goold, “Ink” is set in London, in the gory glory days of a quaint phenomenon: print journalism.
READ THE REVIEW
April 24, 2019
Rupert Goold is the king of bells and whistles. The English showman rarely resists the urge to infuse a text with kinetic energy by drawing from his ample bag of dynamic stage tricks. That can work to a production’s advantage — his Macbeth with Patrick Stewart amped up the bone-chilling shivers by dipping into a wide spectrum of horror-movie tropes; his theatricalization of regal pomp was just the ticket for King Charles III; and as for his work on the American Psycho musical, well, what invites flashy excess more than a Bret Easton Ellis satire of 1980s rapaciousness? Elsewhere, though, the gilded Goold touch can expose the shortcomings of a mediocre play. That was the case with Lucy Prebble’s Enron, as it is again with James Graham’s Ink.
READ THE REVIEW
April 24, 2019
Garish, lurid and brash, “Ink,” the British import now on Broadway in a Manhattan Theatre Club production, is the theatrical equivalent of its subject, the UK’s Daily Sun — the newspaper that reshaped British journalism and propelled Rupert Murdoch’s ascent to media mogul. Like the tabloid, it feels unsubstantial, rushed and icky.
READ THE REVIEW