THE SUN REVEALS NAUGHTY NAYLOR’S NASTY NONSENSE!
Posted on 16th October 2026
Although Henry Naylor has an impressive CV that includes Spitting Image, Dead Ringers and a string of successful plays, it’s unusual for him to appear in them. I first encountered his work doing just that, however, in Afghanistan Is Not Funny. He proved to be a witty and engaging speaker, recounting his experience of researching an earlier play about Bin Laden. I was reminded of the captivating eloquence of Spalding Gray and expected more of the same from Monstering the Rocketman.
On this occasion, however, Naylor was playing the part of Lynx, a cub reporter working for The Sun at the height of the paper’s success. The play was performed in the first person, with Lynx talking directly to the audience with much the same intensity I’d seen before. Indeed, it took me a while before the penny dropped that this wasn’t Naylor’s biography we were listening to. Rather, Lynx is the imaginary glue that binds what we know about Elton John’s defamation case, in the face of unsubstantiated rent-boy stories published in the newspaper. Editor Kelvin MacKenzie is presented as a grotesque caricature alongside a roll call of archetypes and ciphers. It’s all larger-than-life stuff, told from Lynx’s perspective, but just when you’re feeling steamrollered by yet another preposterous story, up it comes on screen, reminding us this really was the febrile attitude of the tabloids in the ’80s.
The Sun’s appalling homophobia is writ large, but the play is less about the specific case – Elton John barely makes an appearance – and more about the astonishing elbow room afforded to opinion makers and their abuse of influence. Naylor draws a parallel with today’s social media free-for-all towards the play’s close, but it feels tacked on. The more compelling argument is already there, in the story of a press that enjoyed considerable freedom but abused it, helping to invite the very restrictions that would later constrain it.
Naylor’s protagonist presents Jeffrey Archer’s landmark libel action as a tipping point, a catalyst for subsequent libel actions. The huge irony that Lynx, trapped in the eighties, cannot know is that Archer will subsequently be imprisoned for perjury, and The Star exonerated. It’s a telling omission in a play concerned with the abuse of press power, given libel law is also used to silence reporting. To my mind, the abiding legacy of MacKenzie’s dreadful fiefdom is that you reap what you sow.