The Death of the Print Unions
“Are you going to fuck everything up?”
Murdoch to Brenda Dean
It was the early 1970s when as a Careers Advisor in Hackney I interviewed two twin 15 year old boys at a local comprehensive. I remember them for three reasons. One that they both had the same two names reversed, like Charles Robert for one and Robert Charles for the other. Secondly, their mother had very diverse views on their academic ability, in her opinion one was near genius and the other rather dim. The school’s view was that they were equal in ability. Thirdly, regardless of ability both were destined for a career in Fleet Street as printers because that is what their father did and jobs “in the print” were a closed shop.
This play is set in 1985-7 about Brenda Dean (Claudia Jolly), the first woman to lead a major union, SOGAT the Society of Graphic and Allied Trades, and she had 5000 members working on Rupert Murdoch (Alan Cox)’s titles in Fleet Street and Gray’s Inn Road. The papers were the Times, the Sun, the News of the World and the Sunday Times and SOGAT members were earning £1000 a week for 16 hours work on manual printing methods. This was many times the amount other workers earned and the equivalent today of £3,900 a week. The work was messy, the hours anti-social and the pressure to get out the papers on time heavy. No-one wanted yesterday’s newspapers.
Murdoch, an upstart Australian who had inherited his first news title from his father in Australia, inspired by Margaret Thatcher’s emasculation of the miners’ unions the year before, ran News International. He bought premises in Wapping and announced that he would be printing a new evening London paper there, the London Post. This was a subterfuge to deceive all into not realising his real plan was to move all his titles to the new mechanised production methods using computers and where journalists could just phone in their news items. Unions were to be banned from Murdoch’s new operation. Murdoch recruited members of the EEPTU Electrical, Electronic, Telecommunications and Plumbing Union, essentially engineers to staff the Wapping plant.
When he announced his plan, 5,000 SOGAT workers went on strike. Murdoch’s immediate response was to sack them all, meaning that under Thatcher’s new anti-picketing laws they would be unable to picket Wapping. Robert Khan and Tom Salinsky’s play In the Print dramatizes the charismatic Brenda Dean resisting Murdoch’s machinations but ultimately powerless against so called progress. How ironic to be writing this now, when 40 years later, newspaper hard copies are dying a death as most news is read online.
Other players in the industry are revealed, two of the editors, of the Sun, Kelvin MacKenzie (Russell Bentley) and of the Sunday Times Andrew Neil (Alasdair Harvey). Both editors are pulled in to support Murdoch’s operation and Murdoch himself in this play boasts of his newprint pulling power in Australia to bring down governments that oppose him. MacKenzie dresses in loud checks, tie undone and in an witty cameo rejects any stories which are not salacious enough. Although he does give in and not print the picture of Arthur Scargill with the “Führer” headline! Bentley plays a few other parts and significantly that of Murdoch’s son, whose Australian accent is better than the paternal version. It is interesting casting that Brian Cox who featured in HBO’s Succession as the character based on Rupert Murdoch has his son, Alan Cox taking the Rupert Murdoch part here.
Other members of the cast play the figures leading other unions so we can build an outline picture of the complicated politics in the playing time. Claudia Jolly as Dean has a terrible decision to take when the whole union is threatened with bankruptcy and her performance is steely and we definitely like her more than Murdoch.
Well done to the King’s Head for this excellent political history play! More please!
Production Notes
In the Print
Written by Robert Khan, Tom Salinsky
Directed by Josh Roche
Cast
Starring:
Alan Cox
Alasdair Harvey
Claudia Jolly
Georgia Landers
Jonathan Jaynes
Russell Bentley
Creatives
Director: Josh Roche
Designer: Peiyao Wang
Composer and Sound Designer: Sarah Spencer
Lighting Designer: Joshua Gadsby
Fight Director: Jonathan Jaynes
Information
Running Time: One hour 30 minutes without an interval
Booking to 3rd May 2026
Theatre:
King’s Head Theatre
116P Upper Street
Islington
London N1 1QP
London WC2H 9LX
Tube : The Angel
Website: kingsheadtheatre.com
Reviewed by Lizzie Loveridge
at the King’s Head Theatre
on 8th April 2026
