Media in the spotlight: National Theatre of Scotland takes on the press with Enquirer

It is no secret that the newspaper industry is in an ongoing state of crisis. Sales are in continual decline as readers turn to the internet instead.

Meanwhile the Leveson Inquiry, set up as a response to the News International phone hacking scandal, has effectively put the entire profession of newspaper journalists - both tabloid and broadsheet - on trial.

It is fitting, then, that today the world is finding out about Enquirer, a new National Theatre of Scotland (NTS) show tackling this very subject, via the internet rather than in print - the announcement having been made in the early hours of this morning.

Enquirer, created by the NTS in partnership with the London Review of Books, will be based on interviews with around 50 people working in the British newspaper industry, including Scotsman editor John McLellan. The interviews were conducted by style magazine writer Paul Flynn, journalist and broadcaster Ruth Wishart, and columnist Deborah Orr, and will be structured into a piece of theatre by the NTS’s Vicky Featherstone and John Tiffany. It’ll be “co-edited” by Andrew O’Hagan, now an NTS regular following the company’s adaptations of his books Be Near Me and The Missing.

You’ll be able to see the results when Enquirer premieres in Glasgow on 26 April - a fast turnaround intended to reflect the ‘rapid response’ nature of 24 hour news, according to the NTS. The show will be performed - very National Theatre of Scotland, this - not in a theatre but on an empty floor of Pacific Quay, where BBC Scotland has its headquarters. The cast will include Billy Boyd, Maureen Beattie and John Bett. It’ll be a promenade performance, to an audience of about 70 people per show - so book soon if you want to go.

It is a little ironic that, at a time when fewer and fewer people trust journalists to tell the truth, theatre-makers - whose job used to be to create dramatic fictions - seem to be trying to step into the breach. A notable trend in recent years has been documentary theatre - shows like The Laramie Project, Stuff Happens or What I Heard About Iraq, whose scripts are based partly or entirely on material from newspaper stories, court transcripts or interviews.

The NTS’s biggest hit, Black Watch, was, to an extent, an example of this genre, with a script based on interviews with soldiers. Enquiry is another. NTS artistic director Vicky Featherstone says that the show is an example of theatre’s ability to “put the questions out there and begin a debate”. Journalists would argue that this is journalism’s job too. It’ll be interesting to see what the media reaction is once the show is up - some of its findings may well feel a little close to the bone. But, given that we journalists have been sitting in judgement on the National Theatre of Scotland for years now, perhaps it’s only fair that the tables are now being turned.