Hot metal, cold heart… In the Print (2026), King’s Head Theatre

I just want to print newspapers…

I was just starting out in publishing when the events depicted in this play were taking place and we too were looking at the emergence of desktop publishing, online (oh yes), expert systems and methods of production that would soon cut out traditional typesetters as well as plate makers and various stages in the production process. Artwork had to have the designer’s NGA membership number on and it was presented to printers with overlays and instructions for printers to photograph and turn into printing plates. Technology was changing fast and, as this play points out, that was an issue for those with costs to cut and others with livelihoods to protect. Of course, Fleet Street was also riddled with “Spanish Practices” and union-based agreements that lowered productivity whilst protecting jobs. There’s blame on both sides here as there always is.

Aware of all this is SOGAT General Secretary, Brenda Dean (here played with wit and resolution by Claudia Jolly) but as she tells the seemingly impenetrable Rupert Murdoch (Alan Cox, playing the Devil with conviction and no heart) “there are ways…”. There might indeed have been other paths to follow in changing the production process for the Australian media Moghul’s four UK titles – The Sun, News of the World, The Times and The Sunday Times – including a negotiated plan involving the various unions and natural wastage but he preferred a more callous and immediate course of action.

Alan Cox and Claudia Jolly (All photos Charlie Flint Photography)

Under the guise of producing a new daily paper, The London Post, Murdoch set up a new printing works in Wapping in which he set up all the print capacity he would need to run his papers and, having done a deal with one of the unions, the EETPU (Electrical, Electronic, Telecommunications and Plumbing Union) he had the technical staff trained up and ready to go with neither SOGAT or the NGA aware. The NUJ was also easily neutralised with the help of The Times Editor Andrew Neil and The Sun’s amoral bundle of unresolved masculine crisis, Kelvin McKenzie. I had a friend who worked for Neil at the time and he was apparently a “good boss” but – she was blonde, good-looking and maybe he had his favourites – and he certainly did his master’s bidding in persuading most of his journalists to betray their brethren.

Alasdair Harvey plays Neil as a tool of Murdoch’s and rather lacking in the principles he has always demanded from others. Such is the life of a critic – those who can do, Andrew, those who can’t just write about it! If ‘Drew is simpering, Kelvin MacKenzie - Russell Bentley having a ball! - is the monster we all know now to be unrepentant, a salesman role-playing as an editor, selecting and twisting the stories he thinks his readers want. I knew someone at The Sun too and in 1989, when Kelvin ran his lies about Liverpool fans stealing from the dead at Hillsborough, his staff pleaded with him not to publish this unevidenced story… he ignored them in favour of the lies.

At the time, as Michael Crick observes in the programme notes, Dean was seen as being too close to Murdoch but the reality as presented here seems to be that she was doing her best to save as many jobs as she could. Written by Robert Khan and Tom Salinsky who also wrote the excellent, informed and entertaining, Gang of Three – also fabulous at this venue, the play is heavy on detail and yet the assured direction from Josh Roche makes light of this and enables the characters to breath as this complex narrative unfolds.

Jonathan Jaynes and Claudia Jolly (All photos Charlie Flint Photography)

This is all the more remarkable as the actors take on multiple roles, Jonathan Jaynes plays Eric Hammond as well as Dean's SOGAT right-hand man Bill Sargeant, whilst Georgia Landers plays the union’s legal brief as well as a whistle-blower from Wapping. The whole space is used with the cast often joining in from the shadows to highlight the voices of workers but all the while Cox’s Murdoch is centre stage facing them all down in his desire to “just print newspapers…”

In the end, we all know that Murdoch was allowed to carry on printing his news… and the crisis averted he was able to secure a foothold in the USA with Fox News where he sent over Mr Neil to work his peculiar magic. But, in a similar way to all political lives ending in some kind of failure what will be his legacy now, not only given the unfortunate impact his type of entertainment has had on democracies and the strength of debate.

More to the point, the revolution started in the mid-80s has accelerated through the dot.com boom and now onto social media news and AI… It was a splendid surprise to see Brian Cox take his seat just before the show started - no pressure Alan! - and you wonder who will succeed Murdoch now and has anyone the skillset to deal with news agendas and breaking narratives that are almost uncontrollable.

Georgia Landers and Russell Bentley (All photos Charlie Flint Photography)

IThankYou Verdict: ***** This is such a well-wrought play in terms of covering the complexity of the issues and the key personalities in a way that entertains and informs and educates: Lord Reith is smiling in his heavenly Broadcasting House: The Truth will out!

In the Print plays at the Kings Head until 3 May 2026 and I strongly urge you to book to see it! Not just Brian Cox, but Neil Kinnock – mentioned in the play – and other notables were in attendance, including Michael Crick who wrote about these events as they unfolded. It’s a production of The Spontaneity Shop, James Quaife Productions and King’s Head Theatre Productions and a World Premier – I hope it runs and runs: this is how power and the media works, now as then. But the centre of that power is again in flux and who knows if the Murdoch family empire can master the digital arena as young technocrats with even more money, begin to over power him and his successors…

 

Full details on the King’s Head website. Another winner!

 

 

 

History Men... The Gang of Three, King’s Head Theatre

 

Oh, I wouldn’t worry too much about Sunny Jim, far too common to be a leader…

It’s now a truism that all political lives end in failure although over recent years we’ve seen more than enough profiting healthily in that state but in the midst of that life we are always so close to death with the knife hovering close to the backs of even the best of friends.

Events open with The Who’s Won’t Get Fooled Again as we join old Oxford and political allies Anthony Crossland (Alan Cox) and Roy Jenkins (Hywel Morgan) meeting at the latter’s house after he has just resigned, on principal, as Labour Party Deputy Leader. Tony senses an opportunity here and wants Roy to support his bid to take over in that position but, as we are to discover, these two have much that divides them as well as the vast amount they have in common. 

Robert Khan and Tom Saliinsky’s new political drama gets us inside the head of these key players at a time of possibility and danger for the Labour Party. Then they had failed to get a third term for Harold Wilson as Ted Heath took the Tories to victory and then, against the odds, they bounced back in 1974 with a win that Jenkins describes as both unlikely and unlucky: Labour was left with an economic time-bomb as well as unruly industrial relations and a Conservative Party starting to define itself around the monetarist purity of Mrs Margaret Thatcher.

The play gets to grips with the anxieties at the heart of Labour’s top team as three moderates fail to form an alliance that might have fended off Thatcher and the subsequent splintering of the party with Jenkin’s departure to form the Social Democratic Party with Roy Rogers, Shirley Williams and David Owen, as the left wing took over with the Tony Benn supporting Michael Foot into power leaving the party in opposition for the longest time since its 1945 landslide.

Hywell Morgan and Alan Cox - photographer Manuel Harlan

Do we tend to lionise former politicians or do we just long for a time when they were more driven by principles and less concerned with sound bites and social media. Writing in the programme, Steve Richards, explains the conditions of the time which were much more conducive to a broad church which allowed debate and lengthy careers to flourish with Jenkins, Healey and Crossland all having served in Wilson’s governments in the sixties and before that Gaitskell in opposition. Crossland’s book, The Future of Socialism (1956) is made the butt of a few jokes here – it’s a framework that supports analysis in any era… not out of date! – is still a key text for the likes of Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband. 

In the play the men are combative and friendly in moments that only occasionally hit the future nail on the head too hard… we’re subsumed in a time of more intellectual debate over possibilities that may never end – a polite civil war involving egos and views of Europe, nationalisation and the balance of payments. There’s love behind the barbs with Tony celebrating Roy’s legalisation of homosexuality and abortion: “you were the bespectacled Father of the Age of Aquarius!” – these men have achieved things but maybe they’re out of ideas when all they want is more power?

Thus, it is that these two friends and a third, from the year above them at Oxford, Dennis Healey (Colin Tierney) play games over the years as fortunes shift and the game slips away as the left with Benn and Foot seemingly making the deal their centrist colleagues couldn’t bring themselves to agree as the popular vote shifted decisively through The Winter of Discontent, and the book balancing resisted so forcibly by the Trade Unions.

The play makes light work of the history and, assumptions there may be aplenty, but they are informed and help to map out the chemistry that combined with circumstance to consign this Labour generation – 12 years in government out of the previous 16 – to opposition for the next 18. It’s not so much how it happened as who it happened to and the characterisations are rich of these three brilliant minds. I can’t see a Reeves, Streeting and Kendall version working quite so well… but then maybe all political lives are revived by the distancing of time?

Colin Tierney and Hywel Morgan - Photographer Manuel Harlan

In these days when there is no longer a “natural party of government”, we see the delusional certainties that make the trio miss out on history with Healey playing games with the IMF and his party and Jenkins driven by principle and privilege and Crossland perhaps wrong-footed by the gifts that came too easily.

IThankYou Theatre rating: **** The political theatre of the recent past makes for a gripping analysis of our politics today; history does not so much repeat itself as continue on the same lines evolving around the same issues and divisions with the added spite of social media and new forms of communication.

Alan Cox is a very plausible Tony Crosland full of charm and wit with his old Oxford edge over Jenkins still informing their relationship, a friendship somewhat deeper than I had imagined. Hywel Morgan’s “Woy” is a man of destiny yet still full of insecurity and a guile whilst Colin Tierney’s assured old Mertonian is the true heavyweight just lacking the charm and the destiny… perhaps all three together would have made the perfect leader?

Kirsty Patrick Ward directs and creates a compelling world of political intrigue, the potential and the quite desperation of ‘70s Britain only a few dozen metres below the streets of 21^st Century Islington former home of King Tony and the young man with the scruffy beard who used to hang on Tony Benn’s every word…

Robert Khan and Tom Salinsky have previously written the acclaimed play on Brexit, as well as other political works Coalition, Kingmaker and Impossible. Their attention to detail is fabulous and their wit hits home throughout, I look forward to Truss: How I Won the War!

The Gang of Three plays at the Kings Head Theatre until 1^st June and you can buy tickets directly from their website here!

All photographs by Manuel Harlan