Theatre in Review: Corruption (Lincoln Center Theater/Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater)There's a bare-knuckled political brawl unfolding eight times a week at Lincoln Center and the season is much livelier for it. Corruption revisits the Rebekah Brooks phone-hacking scandal, which brought down the storied British newspaper News of the World and subjected Rupert Murdoch's media empire to unflattering scrutiny. It's the work of J. T. Rogers, who writes what I think of as National Theatre plays: punchy, big-canvas accounts of contemporary history, which few American playwrights attempt. We're lucky that Lincoln Center Theater, Rogers' home base, supports his works, with their teeming casts of characters and pugilistic thrills, not to mention his candid eye for the world's workings. Corruption, indeed. The play, based on the book Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain by Tom Watson and Martin Hickman, pits Brooks, a Murdoch darling and ruthless editor of Fleet Street tabloids, against a team of investigators, journalists, and political players led by Watson, a Labour MP and party whip known for his brutal, bullying tactics. Wounded by press coverage that has (not entirely inaccurately) branded him "Hatchet Man Watson" and "Mad Dog Trained to Maul" -- the sting exacerbated by fake charges of registering pornographic websites in the names of other political figures -- he finds himself exiled to the House of Commons' Culture, Media, and Sport Select Committee, a Siberia for power seekers. Then again, the appointment allows him to re-open a probe against Brooks, who had previously been implicated in bribing police and hacking the phones of celebrities, including several royals. What Watson and his team uncover is akin to a mob operation, involving spying, smearing, and coercion of everyday people in numbers running to the thousands. (The damage is detailed by a chorus of victims whose lives were ruined by journalistic incompetence and invasion of privacy.) Corruption skips over some of the seamier aspects of the saga, including Brook's admission of sleeping with Andy Coulson, her successor at News of the World, and even certain wilder episodes, including Murdoch getting a foam pie in the kisser during a Parliamentary hearing (Murdoch doesn't appear onstage). Still, Rogers has corralled a vivid cast of sharp-elbowed antagonists, alternately fighting for truth, justice, and the main chance. Bartlett Sher's eminently well-cast production details how the Watson-Brooks battle, a deeply personal vendetta, plays out with national, even global, implications. As Brooks, Saffron Burrows is a character assassin in Botticelli curls and high heels, defending her papers' toxic recipe of scandal, snarky headlines, and nubile page-three girls as the voice of the people; her true goal is influence, the right to shape public policy. Toby Stephens' Watson is a grim, heavy-handed tactician, his naked ambition alienating friends and enemies alike. (Among those driven away by the single-minded pursuit of Brooks are his wife, Siobhan, and their young son.) "Everyone knows how awful [Brooks] is," a colleague tells him. "And everyone sees you waging your campaign against her. But no one is going to join you because no one likes you. Because you are a bad man. Who has done very bad things." Swirling around Brooks and Watson is a universe of predators, victims, litigators, celebrities, news presenters, and politicians, all embodied by some of New York's best character actors. Dylan Baker pulls off an impressive double act as Tom Crone, Murdoch's icy legal fixer, and Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator at the center of the scandal. ("I was paid to dig up secrets because people want to know them. And we don't care how they're dug up, do we?") Sanjit De Silva is a strong presence as Hickman, a journalist formerly stuck on the mundane consumer affairs beat, newly energized by the chance to take on the Murdoch empire. K. Todd Freeman nails the spiky persona of Chris Bryant, the gay MP who hates Brooks (for outing him) only marginally more than he dislikes Watson. Seth Numrich is a chillingly polite sparring partner as James Murdoch, heir apparent to his father's enterprise, whose loathing of Brooks is deepened by his jealousy of her pet employee status. Michael Siberry is an oddly avuncular presence as Max Mosley, the Formula 1 executive whose Nazi-themed sex parties were exposed in the press. ("What they published was a lie invented to sell more papers. Yes, there were uniforms, and I was naked, shaved, and spanked, but we were all consenting adults. More tea?") T. Ryder Smith etches two sharply different characterizations as rogue Guardian reporter Nick Davies and John Yates, the assistant police commissioner caught sitting on mountains of incriminating evidence against Brooks and her associates. Also solid are John Behlmann as Charlie Brooks, Rebekah's husband, who fears that the whole brouhaha will frighten away the woman they've hired as a surrogate mother; Anthony Cochrane as a saturnine Gordon Brown, deftly throwing Watson to the wolves when it becomes expedient; Eleanor Handley as tough, unimpressed New York Times reporter Jo Becker; Robyn Kerr as the ever-alert Siobhan Watson, coaching her husband from a distance; and Sepideh Moafi as Charlotte Harris, a lawyer who unearths a treasure trove of evidence. ("Every shiny person in this country, they've spied on. Kate Middleton, Kate Moss, Kate Beckinsdale -- all the fucking Kates. And that's just the 'K's, mind you.") To keep the action moving at the pace of a printing press, Michael Yeargan has devised a devilishly simple set design, moving around a half dozen table units against an attractively textured background. The team at 59 Productions uses the latter area and an overhead ring of screens to project headlines, news broadcasts, and live feeds of the onstage action, evoking the media-saturated atmosphere in which the characters dwell. Donald Holder's lighting performs the all-important task of constantly reshaping the stage to suggest a variety of locations. Jennifer Moeller's costumes help the actors, most of them playing several roles, lend a distinct profile to each character. Justin Ellington's sound design uses percussive music to pace the action; among other effects, he deploys George Michael's "Freedom" for a key scene in which Watson's allegations enjoy their breakout moment on Twitter. Sher's direction is filled with illuminating moments: Charlie Brooks awkwardly stepping over a table to welcome a visitor; Watson discreetly zipping his pants before making the speech of his career; Yates reacting in stunned silence to a question that implicates him; Davies, receiving a phone threat to his wife, and responding, "I see. Well, when I get a wife, I'll be sure to let her know;" Crone, asked to identify who authorized a series of hush money payments, taking an agonizingly long few seconds before responding, "It was a collective decision;" and Mulcaire bitterly telling Watson, "All you and yours have done is ruin people's lives," meaning, of course, himself. Indeed, Rogers doesn't shy away from the story's equivocal ending, in which a few minor players are punished and everyone else goes on with their lives, in many cases, moving upward. Brooks offers a savagely unrepentant speech defending her papers' grimy tactics, insisting that her profits allow the tamer broadsheets to exist; basically, she says, you need me. It's an exquisite exercise in self-justification as practiced by someone skilled in seizing moral high ground on which she has no real claim. Some viewers have criticized Corruption as an exercise in inside baseball, populated by personalities not well-known in the US, and it's true that if you come with some prior awareness of the hacking scandal, the play is easier to follow. But the implications for an American audience are too obvious to note, as a new election looms and the Murdoch machine continues to process junk news and pseudo-information into cash and political influence. Rogers is hardly the first playwright to sound the alarm about Murdoch: James Graham chronicled the mogul's rise in Ink and David Hare made him the centerpiece of his satire Pravda. (In 2014, the National produced Great Britain, Richard Bean's fictionalized version of the phone-hacking affair.) Corruption, however, is at least as good as its predecessors, which, if you think about it, is good news for the theatre season and alarming news for the rest of us in this fragile democracy. --David Barbour 
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