In The Print at the King’s Head

I had a friend who lived on the 21st floor of a tower block on Cable Street. From that unnerving height above a London street famous for a political battle in 1936, you could see the location of another E1 conflict. It was 50 years later and one year after the miners’ strike had ended in defeat. That had taken place in other parts of the country, of course. Now, London had its own epochal stand-off between workers seeking to defend jobs in an old-school industry against a force hellbent on imposing change.

That force was Rupert Murdoch, newspaper man. The workers were led by Brenda Dean, the first woman to head a major British trade union – SOGAT, acronym for the Society of Graphical and Allied Trades (as almost no one knew). Their combat zone was Murdoch’s new print site in Wapping, historically a maritime area on the north bank of the Thames but, for 54 weeks, shorthand for an industrial relations war in the second term of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain amid a regenerating London Docklands.

The conflict and the motivations of its key protagonists are the subjects of In The Print, a new play at the King’s Head Theatre in Islington. Co-written by King’s Head board chair Robert Khan and his long-time creative partner Tom Salinsky, it pays its audience the compliment of declining to reduce the Wapping dispute of 1986 and early 1987 to a monochrome tale of Wicked Boss v Noble Proles. Instead, it takes on the stiffer challenge of exploring an often morally tangled tale of inter-union rivalries, media industry powers and responsibilities, and the tensions between employees’ rights and technological innovation.

Murdoch’s ruthlessness is conveyed as cunning yet almost civil by Alan Cox. “I just want want to print newspapers,” he insists, practically pleadingly, in the play. A distinction was once made between him and the criminal ex-publisher of the Telegraph, Conrad Black. The latter was described as an ideologue while Murdoch, for all that he was behind The Sun at its most vindictive and extreme, as first and foremost a mogul.

Claudia Jolly, who plays Dean, doesn’t recreate the appearance of the public figure Dean so memorably was, with her Lady Di-era blonde bouffant, but captures her persuasive public presence, a novel feature of news bulletins of the time. She and the script also illuminate a combination of high principle and necessary compromise that guided her actions behind the scenes in a losing situation that unfolded on the streets of Wapping outside the Murdoch plant – where protestors tried to disrupt its products’ distribution – and through the courts.

The play also shows us, through her relationships with colleagues and competitor “brothers”, how novel it was that a woman from Salford was leading the defence of a male-dominated London workforce, characterised by ingrained Spanish practices and a nepotistic closed shop. When Cox’s Murdoch says at one point that he, not the union, is the combatant on the side of progress, a part of you reluctantly agrees. Much of the skill of In The Print is that it re-tells this messy, angry piece of the capital’s and the country’s history without concealing what might be inconvenient. Dean’s SOGAT right-hand man Bill Sargeant, played by Jonathan Jaynes, opens a window onto a world which, seen in a certain light, was controlled by crafty geezers protecting a well-paid skive.

There’s lots of fun in there, too. Members of the excellent six-strong cast, some of them playing more than one part, serve up winning parodies of others involved in the dispute: Norman Willis, general secretary of the Trade Union Congress at a traumatic time, is mocked for taking refuge in writing poems; the playboy aspirations of then-Sunday Times editor Andrew Neil are nicely teased. I attended Saturday’s matinee. On Monday night, the press gang will roll up. I hope the hacks behave and give In The Print good reviews.

The King’s Head theatre setting enhanced the sense of being taken back in time, partly because the audience indicated the resilience of Islington’s grey pound. Also, although the theatre building, just off Upper Street, is very new having opened in January 2024, it is the descendent of and literally just round the corner from the pub of the same name which, for 50 years, doubled as one of the most illustrious small theatre venues in town.

The old King’s Head theatre put on a vast array of shows, nurturing new talent and generally providing a watering hole for what was once sometimes called “the alternative society” (or, more geographically specifically, “Islington trendies”). A feature of that culture was that it could be as sentimental as it sought to be subversive. The King’s Head’s long-time manager opposed decimalisation, so bar staff were still charging in pounds, shillings and pence up to and beyond the Wapping dispute. Parallels, paradoxes, competing views of progress. We could be here all day.

In The Print runs until 3 May. Buy tickets here. Follow Dave Hill on Bluesky and at LinkedIn.

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