Reviews NYCOff-Broadway Published 19 March 2024

Review: Corruption at Lincoln Center

Mitzi Newhouse Theatre ⋄ February 15-April 14, 2024

J. T. Rogers’s new play can’t find a human story to tell. Loren Noveck reviews.

Loren Noveck
Seth Numrich, Dylan Baker, and Saffron Burrows in <i>Corruption</i>. Photo: T. Charles Erickson

Seth Numrich, Dylan Baker, and Saffron Burrows in Corruption. Photo: T. Charles Erickson

The problem with the modern newspaper, according to J. T.  Rogers’s Corruption, set in the UK in the years 2010 and 2011 and based on the nonfiction book Dial M for Murdoch, is that Rupert Murdoch’s media empire is using unethical and criminal tactics—phone hacking, blackmail, influence peddling—to manipulate public opinion and is putting the pursuit of profit above the public good. The problem with newspapers, from NYC in 2024, is that in the absence of their ability to turn sufficient profit, there’s absolutely no discussion of the public good. According to the Medill School of Journalism, our country is on pace to lose a third of its newspapers by the end of 2024, and as much as two thirds of its reporters. More than half of the counties in the U.S. have either no local paper or one remaining weekly outlet. they’re going under right and left. Half of the U.S. gets most of its news from social media. So it’s not that Rogers is wrong to see these events as a building block of our “post-truth world,” or that the events themselves weren’t grossly unethical and repulsive. It’s just that they feel so superseded not just by the past twelve years of the history of print journalism but by the very different role the Murdoch empire had always already played in the USA. By 2010, the “fair and balanced” Fox News was already a #1 cable channel and the newspapers were beginning their slide toward irrelevance. And who even remembers an America where the public good was anything more than a nice side perk to the pursuit of profit?

But putting all of that aside, even if you don’t take Rogers at his word about the significance of the criminal activity and corruption depicted here, there’s a story to tell: a story of police bribery and crusading journalists and the attempt to actually make a difference in the world. It’s the kind of story Rogers likes to tell, about the small human, mostly male, actions behind world events. It’s a story that was well told in Dial M, whose writers, Tom Watson and Martin Hickman, are two of the heroes in the play. But it’s a story that hinges on factual minutiae, on reams of paperwork, and on the occasional zinger delivered in a public hearing, more than it hinges on anything specific about the people who did the investigating. It’s hard enough to hang a play on decade-old history that feels irrelevant in an age where an American recent president wants not an endorsement from the mainstream media but control over a separate social media ecosystem with no pretense of allegiance to the truth. (“Trump Allies Are Winning War over Disinformation,” read a headline in yesterday’s paper.) It’s even harder when your building blocks are paperwork and blog posts, more than people. We get a line, here and there, in Corruption from a victim, someone whose life was damaged by the “dark fuckery” of the Murdoch empire, but eighty percent of our time is spent with politicians, journalists, and lawyers.

Here, we have Tom Watson (Toby Stephens) as our antihero: it’s not a coincidence that he wrote the book on which the play is based. Watson is depicted here as a political bully, forced to resign as Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s enforcer after The Sun, one of Murdoch’s papers, goes after him. making insinuations about his own colleagues to keep them in line in a scandal that ends up threatening his family. Posted to a supposedly boring committee, he finds himself back in the crosshairs of an old enemy, Rebekah Brooks (Saffron Burrows), CEO of News UK, when his Cultural Media and Sport parliamentary committee gets involved in the hacking scandal.

Rogers says the play combines “my interviews with both those who participated in this assault on our society’s institutions and those who fought it, transcripts from the public record, and scenes that are invented whole cloth.” None of it feels like it gets under the skin or inside the minds, let alone the emotions, of anyone involved, though–it’s as if all the statements in it had already been parsed for safe public consumption. The characters start to meld into a sea of men in suits, and the dialect coach does as much to give each character a unique voice as the script. Even the occasional bit of spiky personal detail that slips in feels predigested: Tom’s wife, Siobhan (Robyn Kerr)  is unhappy with his crusade. Rebekah and her husband (John Behlman) are using a surrogate to bear a child whose name they haven’t decided on yet (the surrogate, also played by Kerr, doesn’t get a name either). Charlotte (Sepideh Moafi), one of the lawyers on Tom’s side, only knows how to cook lasagna and a roast. And if Tom and co are motivated by some sort of desire for justice, as nonspecific as that is, Rebekah is even more of a cipher: she wants nothing but to win. 

Director Bartlett Sher and a team of able designers can’t quite figure out how to oomph this up, either. Michael Yeargan’s set consists primarily of conference tables that take a veritable army of stagehands to reposition periodically. Donald Holder’s lighting has to compete with a constant array of screens showing news, Twitter, blog posts, and occasionally a scene background. Jennifer Moeller’s costumes are 80 percent suits in studied neutrals. It’s a serious plot twist when George Michael retweets Tom and gives the sound designer, Justin Ellington, the opportunity to play a pop song. The acting is solid throughout, but there’s just not much for them to work with. 

Tom gets a stirring speech at the end: “We will fight because the truth matters, and because we will not allow it to be chopped up and sold for parts.” It’s a noble sentiment, but it’s hard to believe in a play that doesn’t feel like it gives us any emotional, any human truths.


Loren Noveck

Loren Noveck is a writer, editor, dramaturg, and recovering Off-Off-Broadway producer, who was for many years the literary manager of Six Figures Theatre Company. She has written for The Brooklyn Rail, The Brooklyn Paper nytheatre.com, and NYTheater now, and currently writes occasionally for HowlRound and WIT Online. In her non-theatrical life, she works in book publishing.

Review: Corruption at Lincoln Center Show Info


Produced by Lincoln Center Theater

Directed by Bartlett Sher

Written by J. T. Rogers, based on the book Dial M for Murder by Tom Watson and Martin Hickman

Scenic Design Michael Yeargan; PROJECTIONS: 59 Productions; COSTUME DESIGN: Jennifer Moeller,

Lighting Design Donald Holder

Sound Design Justin Ellington

Cast includes Dylan Baker, John Behlman, Saffron Burrows, Anthony Cochrane, Sanjit de Silva, K. Todd Freeman, Eleanor Handley, Robyn Kerr, Sepideh Moafi, Seth Numrich, Michael Siberry, T. Ryder Smith, Toby Stephens

Link
Show Details & Tickets

Running Time 2 hours 45 minutes


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