How ‘Ink’ Turns Rupert Murdoch Into Someone You Actually Want to Watch

One part of playwright James Graham’s brain—the sensible part—watched the concurrent unfolding of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump in horror. But another part of his brain—the part where great dramatic writing is born—couldn’t help but feel differently. 

“That part [was] thrilled and excited because I sort of have an old-fashioned, slightly sentimental view of drama’s responsibility to try to help make sense of the insensible,” admits Graham, whose drama “Ink,” running at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, is nominated for six Tony Awards, including best play. “I hoped that maybe the play would be an examination of these topics, and it would have more value as events kept unfolding.”

The subject of “Ink” could be considered atypical for the stages of Broadway. Set in 1969 London, the play follows a young Rupert Murdoch in his mission to take over the Sun tabloid, long before he became the New York Post and Fox News gargantuan he’s known as today. This Murdoch is “a young man with new ideas in a very old industry,” Graham explains.

But audiences—liberal-leaning ones in New York as well as in London, where the play premiered—enter the theater with their own preconceptions of who Murdoch is, and “plucky youngster” likely isn’t among them.

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“That was a huge obsession of mine when I began,” Graham says, explaining that his goal was to create a Murdoch with whom those watching the play would actually want to spend an evening. “It felt important to challenge those preconceived ideas a little bit. I think you can do that without endorsing the politics of Rupert Murdoch, but it’s also important to not just start by dismissing them. Creating a two-dimensional villain isn’t helpful. It isn’t helpful to confirm an audience’s own prejudices without challenging them. Rupert Murdoch doesn’t wake up every morning and think he’s making the world worse—he thinks he’s making it better. An audience can surprise itself by rooting for these people even when they’re aware what the undercurrent is.”

Of course, getting your audience to—if not root for—sympathize with a morally dubious protagonist ultimately depends as much on the playwright creating the characters as the actors portraying them. For “Ink,” that falls to Bertie Carvel, Tony-nominated for his Murdoch, and Jonny Lee Miller as the lesser-known but influential editor Larry Lamb.

“There are positives and negatives to portraying somebody who’s real,” Graham says. “You get to hit the ground running with all of this biographical detail. The negative is, how do you liberate yourself from the literalism of that truth in order to play a theatrical politician, a character? We did a lot of work that was very cerebral. [The actors] did a lot of research without me and watched clips online and read autobiographies. But I think once you’re in the room, you see them as characters and not real people, and what’s always thrilling as the writer is watching that stage when the actor takes complete ownership of the character. The actor sort of takes them from you, and they go on to know more about them than you do. You sort of let them go.”

What Graham won’t let go of, however, is his duty as writer to examine the real-life events of “Ink” and, hopefully, make some sense of the seemingly senseless.

“For this play, which is about how the truth can be weaponized and fictionalized for political gain, I felt a very keen responsibility to not misrepresent the truth,” he explains. “But also, audiences are very smart and know that this is a crafted piece of art, and they expect to be satisfied on a dramatic level. [A character] actually mentions this in the play: Sometimes shit just happens and it doesn’t necessarily mean anything. What drama does beautifully is give it structure, give it meaning. It makes sense of what the hell happened and where the hell we are.”