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Age guidance: 14+
Performance dates
26 Mar - 3 May 2026
Run time: 90 mins
No interval
It's 1985 and Brenda Dean is the first woman to lead a major British trade union. But she quickly faces a crisis as Rupert Murdoch unleashes his clandestine plans to revolutionise the production of British newspapers.
With 5,000 jobs on the line and the future of newspapers in the balance, she decides to take on Murdoch and his growing global media empire. But with time running out, and Murdoch's influence expanding, can she pull together the might of the unions to bring him down?
From the writers of ★★★★★ box office smash The Gang of Three comes this politically charged thriller about "The Battle of Wapping". A year-long clash of wills between Rupert Murdoch and Brenda Dean where treachery, secret plots, technological change and civil unrest collide.
In the Print (King’s Head) is written by Robert Khan and Tom Salinsky, who had a snowball hit with Gang of Three, which genuinely makes 1970s Labour Party machinations around the party leadership very entertaining. Here they focus on the 1980s battle between media magnate Rupert Murdoch, owner of the Sunday Times, and the print unions led by Brenda Dean, the formidable leader of the union representing the print unions, who opposed Murdoch’s vision to revolutionise newspaper production. Even better, it’s directed by Josh Roche, whose production of The Forsyte Saga was recently seen both in London and at the RSC in Stratford.
If you reckon that ballet is mostly pretty but not very galvanising, think again and head to the Royal Opera House for Mayerling. Kenneth MacMillan’s ballet may hail from 1978, but it is a brutal examination of power, sex and suicide inspired by the deaths of Crown Prince Rudolf of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and his mistress, Mary Vetsera. A massive scandal at the time and one whose dark eroticism is explored, most notably in one of ballet’s most famed pas de deux.
23 Mar, 2026 | By Lyn Gardner