James Graham has done more to bring matters of civic engagement into popular theatre than any writer in a generation. What seems on the face of it like a rather disarming politics-geekery (as in plays such as This House and Labour Of Love) reaches wider. Ink, one of his two plays currently in the West End, uses the birth of the Sun newspaper to examine links between politics, media and entertainment. Now Quiz, which on the face of it deals with one of the great British television scandals of recent years, does the same as regards entangling entertainment and justice.

In 2001 Charles Ingram, an army major, was accused of cheating his way to the top prize on TV game show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? with the guidance of significant coughs from the audience; he, his wife and another competitor, Tecwen Whittock, were prosecuted in 2003. Graham and director Daniel Evans cleverly use a hybrid courtroom/game-show dramatic format to look at the matter from all angles. The play touches on the British fondness for quizzing before giving a whistletop tour of TV quiz shows, with Keir Charles playing a range of celebrity questionmasters; audience members are invited onstage as contestants, and on press night designer Lez Brotherston was thankful that this wasn’t one of his own stage sets as he competed in a mock-heat of Bullseye.

The focus then tightens to the story of the Ingrams (Gavin Spokes and Stephanie Street) while also revealing the ways in which Millionaire is structured (or rigged, as some would say) to encourage popular interest, and various techniques to circumvent its constraints. There are even audience votes on the couple’s guilt after the first act (prosecution) and second (defence); the radical difference (on opening night, anyway) between the two votes makes its own point about our susceptibility to media. (In real life all three accused were convicted but given non-custodial sentences.)

Graham also comments, briefly but significantly, on the televisation of parliamentary proceedings and the campaign to allow cameras into courtrooms, keeping us aware in the moment that we are being manipulated by the piece. It’s not perfect – the second half, for instance, feels much more flatteringly “serious” than the first – but it confirms that Graham’s talent is for animating his fascination with how we involve ourselves as citizens.

Written for the Financial Times.