"Ink". St John's Garden Quad Auditorium
James Graham is all over Oxford this term. His footballing love letter to Gareth Southgate, Dear England , whipped into the New Theatre in January, and now his 2017 docudramedy about Larry Lamb, Rupert Murdoch and the rising of The Sun in 1969 is the annual St John's College play. Graham specialises in plays based on true events. And the key question of how to turn the vagaries of real life into apparently intentional drama is one to which he has clearly found the answer. More than that, it's the question that lies at the heart of this very play. Ink , as its title suggests, peers inside not just the newspaper industry, but at the art of writing itself. When Lamb tells Murdoch that there's no such thing as 'Why?' in a story, only 'What happens next?' he's scratching the itch in the playwright's own head. Do stories need to follow traditional narrative curves to succeed, or can they simply re-show events, as they happened? St John's Drama Societ...
