BWW Reviews: CLARION, Arcola Theatre, April 22 2015

"Showbiz! Showbiz! What's happening in C**ts' Corner?" (Morris Honeyspoon, Editor, The Clarion).

It's 25 years since "Stick It Up Your Punter" exposed (to hilarious effect) what went on behind the scenes at The Sun. Since then, Private Eye's Street of Shame column has shed light on the working practices of the likes of Paul Dacre, Richard Desmond and Rupert Murdoch - and it doesn't look very nice at all. Stir into this mix of egos and macho posturing the impact of the web-driven, 24/7 instant news culture that newspapers have partly promoted and partly resisted, and you have newsrooms frantically trying to produce more news, faster and faster with fewer and fewer staff (and that's without mentioning Leveson andOperation Weeting). Mark Jagasia saw it happening as a tabloid journalist and now he's poured all the insecurity and bile that sloshes around the popular press into his first play, Clarion(continuing at the Arcola Theatre until 16 May).

And what a rich comic seam he's mining! There's the work experience girl, Pritti (a dazzlingly dim Laura Smithers), who burns with ruthless ambition, but knows only celebrity soaked showbiz gossip which, even on the world's worst newspaper, The Clarion, isn't quite enough. There's her opposite - the earnest Josh (Ryan Wichert channeling some of The Office'sMartin Freeman's weary disdain at the grotesques that surround him) - who rejoices in the title "Immigration Editor" having sourced 300 consecutive front pages about the threat to Britain's way of life. Some of them might even have been true. Peter Bourke and Jim Bywater give us a couple more characters (well, caricatures) who get plenty of laughs, even if the comedy gets very broad indeed at times.

At the heart of the play are the two characters whose lives have been intertwined for years but whose (journalistic) marriage of convenience is heading for divorce. Verity Stokes (Clare Higgins) may have poked and prodded her pen into some of the twentieth century's darkest corners (Rwanda, Sarajevo and plenty more) but her virtuous truth-telling is long in the past - until she sees a letter sent to The Clarion and buried by its editor. She has compromised plenty for the paper, but is ignoring this incendiary missive a step too far?

That's the plot, but the joy of this play is in the satire, especially the one-liners that flow like a torrent from the foul mouth of Morris Honeyspoon, editor of The Clarion and defender of traditional British values. Greg Hicks' angular frame and pinched features are set perfectly for the invective that gushes forth: part Jimmy (Reginald Perrin's paranoid brother-in-law) and part a right-wing version of Ben Elton c1987, the monologues building and building to outrageous crescendos. And yet there's a hint of a rounded man behind the monster - allusions to art, history and high culture abound, as do metaphors and similies that would find a more comfortable home in the Sunday Times rather than The Clarion. Did Morris create this persona or did the dysfunctional Press create Morris?

I laughed as often and as loudly as I have done in any theatre in years, just pausing for a moment to assure myself that I (and the likely audience at this achingly hipster venue) were laughing at Morris and not (as my father always claimed about many of Alf Garnett's fans) with Morris. One felt a pang of guilt about waiting, as Bill Grundy famously did when interviewing the Sex Pistols, for Morris to say something else outrageous, to up the stakes still further - and he usually obliged.

But words, as the play tells us, do matter and eventually, as Jagasia's closing scenes show us unequivocally, hate leads to hurt - a lot of hurt.

Photo Simon Annand.