Rupert Murdoch is one of those towering but flawed figures of power beloved of dramatists. Shakespeare would have used him, if he’d had a time machine. David Williamson had a go in his play Rupert (2013), and he is reported to be writing a screenplay for a US television mini-series. Now the Brits have tackled him, in the shape of James Graham’s play Ink, which has had its world première in London at the Almeida Theatre. Graham takes us back to the ‘Dirty Digger’ days in 1969, when a younger pre-phonetap-scandal Murdoch, fresh out of Australia, took over a moribund rag called The Sun, jacked up circulation to stratospheric levels, and permanently changed not only Fleet Street but the whole of Western print media. And he was only getting started.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about this splendid play, so well served by Rupert Goold’s lively production, is that travelling with Murdoch is such an enjoyable ride. The story is a variant on the legend of Faust, with The Sun’s new editor Larry Lamb as a dour Yorkshire Faust and Murdoch as a brilliantly seductive Mephistopheles – brash, foul-mouthed, impatient with old-school journalism and determined to give the readers what they want. He might be a devil but he has all the best tunes. You start to wonder whether he might be right.