#tim steed

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING Theatre Royal Drury Lane, London, Thursday 6th March 2025 My favourite Shakespeare play directed by my least favourite director?  What could possibly go wrong?  Jamie Lloyd’s productions tend to be like Marmite i.e. they remind me of shit.  Having suffered through his Romeo and Juliet and been inspired to consider mounting a rescue mission to get Sigourney Weaver out of…

26 June 2017, Almeida Theatre

Preface to this post: Charlie Cox was there the night we went, saw him having a chat with Richard Coyle beforehand, turns out they did some Pinter shorts together back in the day, Charlie was bi, Richard was married to Gina McKee, it was a beautiful time.

I was really really excited for this production. I think it was my first time seeing a James Graham play? His work has always sounded really interesting from what I’ve read about it, and gosh that cast- Bertie Carvel has to be one of the most exciting actors working in British theatre right now, and Richard Coyle was the prince in Don Carlos way back in 2005, which was one of Those Formative Theatre Experiences for me. Obviously, having said “I was really really excited”, the show did not live up to the hype I (maybe unfairly?) placed on it. Small disclaimer: we went on the final preview, so maybe Rupert Goold notesed the shit out of it and what the critics saw and seemed to really appreciate the day after was very different. 

Basically, it felt like a mess. There’s a sort of framing device with Rupert Murdoch and Larry Lamb at the beginning discussing what makes a good story; this segues into a dinner scene, which is repeated at various points throughout (different dinners, at different points in the story of the Sun). It works to some extent, but it isn’t really hugely elegant, and I could not get on with Carvel’s Rupert Murdoch off the back of it. I’ll just do this bit now, and get it out of the way- I don’t understand how this performance works in the production as a whole, and I do think my friend’s comment that the play would be stronger without Murdoch appearing at all is pretty on the money. It’s not a bad performance at all; he’s a great actor, and to me it seems as though it’s working to do what it’s trying to do. It’s this weird kind of caricature thing, all composed of strange body language and peculiar vocal qualities, but then it looks like they’ve gone to the lengths of coloured contact lenses? That really confuses me, because there’s such broadness to it coupled with a very small detail like that? “Faustian” is the adjective that seems to be making the rounds in the reviews, and it’s definitely an angle, but then Graham introduces some humanising elements (Murdoch doesn’t want to look at Page 3, for example). Compared with the performances everyone else is giving (at least in the scenes, there are musical-type interludes which are obviously non-naturalistic), Carvel is doing something that’s way out there. 

Richard Coyle holds the whole thing together, and is very much the lead. It’s definitely not the sexy role, and it would have been nice to see him get to go to greater emotional extremes, but it’s a solid (that’s a really unhelpful adjective, he’s better than that) and very interesting performance. Would definitely recommend the Stage review purely for the selection of pictures of him smearing ink on himself (cos that’s the title of the play, innit). Of the rest of the ensemble, Tim Steed absolutely nails every comic moment he gets, even if a lot of them involve punctuation jokes, and Sophie Stanton is a welcome female voice amongst the editorial team. Pearl Chanda plays the first Page 3 girl, Stephanie Rahn, and has probably the longest scene with Coyle and Carvel towards the end of the play where Lamb asks her whether she’d be willing to do the Page 3 thing, and then they deal with the fallout from that along with Murdoch. I’d say that’s the best scene in the whole show; the actors get to stretch themselves a bit, and play something that has some emotional weight. This is another strange element of the play, which comes from (ironically) the difficulty Graham seems to have deciding which parts of the Sun story to stage. 

The first half of the production deals with Lamb and Murdoch getting together, Lamb abandoning the Mirror and setting up his editorial team, and that group of people constructing the Sun’s style and emphasis. The second half then chooses two episodes in the history of the paper, which (pretty uncomfortably) deal with female trauma, and its impact on the largely male-run Sun. This is obviously quite tricky, and I may mis-step when writing about it but I’ll give it a go. The first incident Graham chooses to focus on is the kidnapping of the deputy editor’s wife, Muriel McKay, and the ethical debates around reporting on a scoop of this nature when it’s happening to the Sun itself. The climax of the play is then the introduction of Page 3. As you’re watching, you realise that you’re going, seemingly as an escalation, from kidnapping and death to Page 3, which is a whole kettle of fish in itself. It’s kind of hard, certainly with the kidnapping plotline, to work out who on stage you’re meant to be feeling sorry for; Mrs McKay is obviously absent, so you’re watching Murdoch and McKay deal with the emotion of the situation and Lamb struggle (sort of? Not really) with how to present the story for the paper. Pearl Chanda is at least onstage, and does a really great job with the material she’s given, so we at least get a female perspective on the trauma that is enacted there, but it feels too slight. It feels silly to be getting angry about how feminist a show about the Sun and about Page 3 can be, but I think surely if you’re going to present that story, which is fucked up, you have to make more of an effort to be nuanced and critical in your presentation of it. If anyone has seen Ink and has things to say about this, I’d love it if you dropped me a message- I’m still trying to work out what I think exactly!

I have other stuff to say about this production, but I’ve annoyed myself quite a lot trying to delve into the ethics/gender politics of the thing, so I’m going to stick this up and perhaps come back to it.