“Sexy” is not a word you’d use to describe the founding of most newspapers. More accurate descriptors might include: “formal,” “dusty” and “self-important.” The Sun, however, is not like most newspapers.
The tabloid — Britain’s most popular daily — is bold and brassy, covering the TV show “Love Island” with the same gusto as it does Brexit. After last month’s big jewel heist in London, the Sun’s front page read “Demon Burglar of Fleet Street.” Unlike the Guardian, the Sun is fun.
And so is the exciting new play about it, “Ink,” which opened on Broadway Wednesday night after its West End run. James Graham’s down-and-dirty dramedy tells the story of the 1969 purchase of the struggling paper by a scrappy Australian named Rupert Murdoch.
Murdoch (who also owns The Post) had acquired London’s News of the World a year earlier, but the Sun was his biggest prize yet. Bertie Carvel, last seen on Broadway as Miss Trunchbull in “Matilda,” plays him as a lively gate-crasher, determined to infiltrate the clubby, pretentious world of UK paper owners. Not to join it, but to conquer it.
Larry Lamb (Jonny Lee Miller), a working-class editor from northern England, is recruited to lead a merry band of misfits. Lamb’s mission: to transform the Sun from a boring, stodgy broadsheet into a throbbing, popular tabloid. “Make it loud!” Murdoch commands, and gives Lamb one year to make the Sun the top paper in Britain.
Considering its circulation then — under a million, compared with the Daily Mirror’s 5-million-plus daily readers — the Mirror’s Hugh Cudlipp (Michael Siberry) and other rival editors don’t give it a chance. Those chumps are soon left choking on their cigar smoke.
How will Lamb turn things around? One of the funniest scenes starts as a brainstorming session on potential features that spirals into a rebellious free-for-all, as staffers lose their inhibitions and scream their guiltiest pleasures. Sex! Gossip! The weather! The telly!
Their instincts, considered down market at the time, pay off. The Sun takes off — after which there are major consequences and big drama.
Nothing about Graham’s unexpectedly seductive play — the smoky newsroom meetings, back-room deals, even a lesson on how the printing press functions — is ever less than rousing. The show is hoisted even higher by director Rupert Goold, doing his best work since the similarly irreverent “King Charles III,” by mixing in music and dance for a raging party vibe.
Embodying that uproarious spirit is Carvel, who makes Murdoch into a magnetic, eccentric Confucius of the news business. Just as good is Miller, who, as the intrepid and inspired Lamb, challenges his staff to inject “a bit of fun” into their new creation. “Ink” is way more than just a bit of fun.
