Off-Broadway Play Review—“Corruption” at Lincoln Center Theater

Corruption

Written by J.T. Rogers; directed by Bartlett Sher

Performances through April 14, 2024

Mitzi Newhouse Theater, 150 West 65th Street, NYC

lct.org

A scene from Corruption (photo: T. Charles Erickson)

In Corruption, playwright J.T. Rogers tackles what he considers an early salvo in our ongoing—and, seemingly, losing—war with alternative facts and media manipulation: the phone-hacking scandal that engulfed Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, News Corp, and specifically his now-defunct tabloid News of the World and its editor Rebekah Brooks. 

Rogers and director Bartlett Sher have constructed a breathless real-life drama that plays like a nail-biting thriller: even those in the audience who know the outcome are on the edge of their seats as it plays out, since Rogers’ writing and Sher’s staging create a kaleidoscope that alternates between the expansive (media shenanigans and the government’s initially hesitant investigation) and the personal (the effects on ordinary people, especially the family of polarizing politician Tom Watson, who made it his crusade to take down Brooks and Murdoch) in an absorbing 2-1/2 hours.

In 2016’s Oslo—which told the complicated story of the attempt to broker a peace deal between Israel and Palestine—Rogers and Sher created the blueprint for making lively theater about recent history. Like Oslo, Corruption at times moves too quickly and tries to cover too much, sometimes skating superficially across issues. Some of the scenes between Watson and his understanding but frustrated wife Siobhan, while dramatically necessary, simply move the play forward without being truly gripping.

Far more successful are the dramatizations of behind-the-scenes movements by Brooks and Murdoch—the latter through the unseen Rupert’s CEO son, James, and Tom Crone, the mogul’s legal counsel—as well as the unlikely coupling of Watson’s small office and journalists from The Independent and The Guardian, who hope to collect enough evidence proving the culpability of News Corp (whose upper management’s standard line was that they didn’t know what was going on—and, by the way, we’re not doing it any more) and somehow dent the Murdoch empire’s ubiquity.

It’s these scenes—shuttling back and forth among News Corp machinations, Watson and the journalists’ probes (often at great personal risk) and the government’s tardy but welcome inquiry—that are the racing heart of Corruption, as Rogers’ fleet scenes are given an excitingly cinematic sheen by Sher on the small Newhouse stage with major assists from Michael Yeargan’s sets, Donald Holder’s lighting and 59 Productions’ projections. A ring of video screens above the stage displays various news broadcasts’ “breaking news,” also projected onto the rear wall, along with various tweets Watson sends out in a desperate attempt to gain attention for his initially foundering investigation. 

There’s an amusing moment when, despondent, Watson realizes he needs some sort of public acknowledgement of his efforts; suddenly, none other than George Michael approvingly retweets his posts and Michael’s “Freedom ’90” rings out, closing the first act with the song’s supermodel-stuffed music video playing on those very screens. 

In a play with more than three dozen speaking parts, nearly all of the actors in the excellent ensemble do double, triple, quadruple duty, among whom the very able Dylan Baker, Anthony Cochrane, Eleanor Handley, Robyn Kerr and Michael Siberry stand out. In a tricky role, Saffron Burrows makes Rebekah Brooks formidably sinister without ever turning her into a stock villain. 

At the play’s center is Toby Stephens as the fascinatingly flawed Tom Watson, an unlikely whistleblower at the center of a scandal that threatens to destroy previously held norms of democracy and what’s considered the truth. Watson was no stranger to lowdown dirty politics, and Stephens catches every nuance of his abrasive, aggressive personality. 

Stephens even gives Rogers’ concluding soapbox dialogue (“We will fight because the truth matters, and we will not allow it to be chopped up and sold for parts. We will fight, as long and hard as it takes, because this is our democracy. And that is worth fighting for. So you stand up. You hear me? Stand up.”) the honest commitment it needs to end Corruption with a bang.