The Leveson Enquirer
The findings of Lord Justice Leveson’s inquiry into the culture, practices and ethics of the British press were finally published in late November, and have the potential to drastically re-shape the country’s journalistic and political landscapes.
The 18-month inquiry gained reams of press and hours of TV coverage, but one of the most intriguing responses it provoked came in the form of Enquirer, a unique site-specific play created by the National Theatre of Scotland in collaboration with author Andrew O’Hagan, a Creative Writing Fellow in the Department of English at King’s.
Enquirer came out of conversations between Professor O’Hagan, National Theatre of Scotland Chief Executive Vicky Featherstone, and director John Tiffany, best known for his multi-award-winning play Black Watch. “We shared a certain alarm,” O’Hagan explains, “over the way Leveson’s focus on guilt and blame was obscuring some deeper truths about the state of British journalism.”
The play, which was initially performed in the spring inside a disused office building in Glasgow, was billed as a ‘rapid response work’. Taking its raw material from “more than 60 hours” of interviews with senior figures from across the nation’s press, which was then edited down into a script, the piece then continued to evolve over the course of its run, incorporating the latest developments emerging from the Royal Courts of Justice. For O’Hagan, primarily a novelist and essayist by trade, this way of working was something quite new. “Testing out these ideas of site-specific and ‘verbatim’ theatre, each of which has its own particular traditions, was an exciting challenge.”
Another challenge was to explore just how far the phone-hacking scandal actually constituted something new and shocking. “This is the play’s central question, and there’s an element of truth in both arguments. On the one hand there’s a real tradition of scurrilous journalism that dates right back to the cheap sensationalism of the Victorian penny dreadfuls. But on the other, there is something quite singular about the current situation, where economic circumstances and technological changes have created an environment where under-pressure editors push reporters further and harder for juicier and juicier stories... There seems to be a real sense of panic in the air.”
But with the months of hearings finally over and its recommendations made public, Professor O’Hagan remains highly sceptical about the inquiry’s potential to change journalism for the better. “Leveson was essentially toothless; anything that sets up politicians and journalists to contemplate wholesale changes in journalism was destined to be like trying to get turkeys to vote for Christmas.
“But as a result, Enquirer definitely gained a certain validity from being neither press nor politics, and I think it points to a really important role for the arts in the public discourse. This is something we in the Creative Writing programme at King’s, and in Life Writing as well, are really looking at: the ways in which fiction can probe areas that journalism and politics can’t quite get a handle on.”