The five basic questions of journalism, with their answers in the present instance: Who? Publisher Rupert Murdoch and editor Larry Lamb. What? Murdoch’s takeover, and Lamb’s reinvention, of the Sun newspaper. When? 1969-70. Where? Fleet Street, when it was still so deeply identified with the press that in this play it’s simply referred to by its denizens as “the street”. Why? Ah, now, that’s the interesting one. Lamb avers early on that it’s in fact the least important of the five, and by the end he is credited by Murdoch (and implicitly by playwright James Graham) with having killed it entirely. The Sun’s drives were never investigative or explanatory: time and again we are told that its keynotes are “fun” and, above all, sales – Murdoch’s ambition was for it to overtake the Daily Mirror within a year of his buying the title from it.

The Murdoch Sun is a byword in liberal circles for almost everything that is wrong with the British press. Graham, unrivalled as a political-historical playwright (and what is the press but the continuation of politics by other means?), dares to go beyond the same old canards. The first half of the play, at least, shows the upside of cheeky populism as a corrective to the increasingly stuffy preachiness of the Mirror under Hugh Cudlipp. It seems like an adventure: the recruitment of staff is staged by Rupert Goold as the stage equivalent of a movie training montage, complete with musical pulse.

Bertie Carvel is admirable as ever as Murdoch, but this is Lamb’s story. Richard Coyle shows his early idealism and its erosion by ever more uncaring ambition: his decision to eat his own, so to speak, by exhaustively covering the kidnapping of the wife of Murdoch’s deputy chairman, and then to introduce topless Page 3 models as an equally naked sales gimmick. Pearl Chanda gets her best scene at this point as model Stephanie Rahn (née Khan), although Graham, normally an impeccable researcher, seems oddly ignorant of the distinction between sales and readership. It was a vertiginous ascent, as symbolised by Bunny Christie’s set design of piled-up writing desks; and it’s probably true that at the end of it the question was not “Why?” but “What next?”

Written for the Financial Times.