Review: Corruption Dramatizes the Breaking of a U.K. Journalism Scandal

If Corruption and his preceding Oslo suggest anything, playwright J.T. Rogers has a formula. Take a historical event, dramatize it on the broadest possible scale, pepper the seriousness with unexpected bits of levity, and wrap it all up by gesturing toward how what we’ve just seen is relevant to the present. If nothing else, they’re “educational” if you go into them not knowing all the details of the history they’re dramatizing. Whether they make for great theater, however, is less certain.

Rogers’s subject here is the U.K. scandal in which employees of the tabloid newspaper News of the World were caught hacking into people’s phones and using other seedy methods to get stories. Based on Tom Watson and Martin Hickman’s book Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain, the play whizzes through two years’ worth of history from 2010-11 in exploring how the newspaper’s methods were uncovered and exposed.

Corruption features a large cast to tell its epic story, with most of its troupe of 13 playing multiple figures. Two of them, though, only play one character each. Toby Stephens is Watson, the member of Parliament who was instrumental in bringing News of the World‘s abuses of power to light; Saffron Burrows is Rebekah Brooks, the paper’s editor. In Rogers’s retelling, Watson, himself a victim of a smear campaign initiated by News of the World, is David to Brooks’s Goliath, since she has the full might of the tabloid’s parent company, News Corporation, behind it.

Beyond the procedural details, Rogers also has broader concerns in mind. Corruption paints a portrait of an entire society in the clutches of a ruthless media conglomerate that wields its outsize power and influence simply for its own profit rather than any greater good. Given the fact that News Corporation also owns both Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, it’s a story that surely resonates here in the United States. Lest such parallels are lost on you, Rogers has included a note in the program that states it directly: “What I…saw as a British tale about a specific abuse of power by a particular media company now seems to be the origin story of our post-truth world.”

Such an assertion seems dubious if one knows even a little bit about journalism history. The abuses of power sanctioned by Rupert Murdoch, News Corporation’s CEO at the time, are, if anything, logical extensions of the sensationalistic “yellow journalism” pioneered by American publishers William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer in the late 19th century. But then, the naïveté of Rogers’s claim is fully in line with the brotherhood-of-man platitudes that marred Oslo.

Corruption, at least, doesn’t feature anything as embarrassingly sentimental as the Israeli and Palestinian representatives who both have daughters named Maya in Oslo. And yet, even Rogers’s attempts at character drama, however true to life — Watson’s wife Siobhan’s (Robyn Kerr) exasperation at her husband’s obsession with exposing News of the World; Brooks and her husband Charlie’s (John Behlmann) use of a surrogate (also Kerr) to become parents — come off as transparent attempts to bring human interest to a story that might have worked better by simply sticking to its procedural aspects. His attempts at humor throughout the play also feel like the equivalent of a professor desperately trying to grab their students’ attention out of fear of losing it.

The best that could be said about Bartlett Sher’s direction of this world-premiere production is that it is admirably efficient — if one can overlook the frequent, and increasingly distracting, sight of stagehands and actors moving a handful of tables around throughout the production to signify different settings. (Michael Yeargan is credited as the set designer, but he mostly appears responsible for coming up with the circle of televisions hanging from the ceiling.) The projections from 59 Productions, featuring recreations of news broadcasts and simulated live-video feeds, do most of the heavy lifting. Justin Ellington’s sound design exudes the most wit, with variations on BBC television theme music heard throughout.

As for the cast, naturally Stephens and Burrows stand out as the two actors who get to come up with sustained characterizations. Stephens vibrates with righteous fury as Watson, while the generally steely Burrows brings moments of nuance that add heft to the play’s suggestion that News Corporation’s Mafia-like organizational structure allowed Brooks the luxury of turning a blind eye to the shady journalistic practices under her leadership. As with much of Rogers’s play itself, that’s certainly a worthy and interesting point to make — but worthy and interesting point-making in and of itself does not a great play make.