Clarion (Arcola Theatre)

The Clarion is a failing newspaper whose editor, Morris Honeyspoon – in a savagely hilarious performance by Greg Hicks – commands a sinking ship of washed-up has-beens and youthful ignoramuses. At morning conference, which he attends carrying a Roman centurion’s helmet and an old car horn, he delivers foul-mouthed reactionary tirades against his own lily-livered staff, the BBC, the liberal broadsheets and all such "cocks in their ivory towers."

First-time playwright Mark Jagasia is a former show business editor on the Daily Express, and certainly catches something of a last-orders-on-the-Titanic mood in what is actually an old-fashioned newsroom scenario: the proprietor (whom we never see) is a Cypriot immigrant who runs a chain of topless burger bars – which in no way inhibits daily anti-immigration stories or thunderous denunciations of tawdry pop stars and pornographers.

Word reaches Morris that this proprietor wants to hire some show-business floozy called Sapphire to write a column. Her bulldog in a tutu has gone missing on Hampstead Heath, and young Joshua Moon (Ryan Wichert), whom Morris has humiliated by making him stand on a chair in conference, is despatched to the "poofter-ridden" north London up-hills as if they were Goose Green or the Gaza Strip.

The energy of the piece – which tails off badly in the second act – comes from the axis of friendship between the beleaguered Morris and veteran columnist Verity Stokes (Clare Higgins) who has filed copy from Port Stanley, Soweto, Sarajevo, Kinshasa, Liberia and Rwanda; "Okay, but I don’t want to write on the travel desk," pipes up the pea-brained trainee, Pritti Singh (Laura Smithers), whose college course was geography and ethical dance.

While Pritti finds her feet and Jim Bywater’s news editor in red braces somehow keeps the show on the road (all the secretaries have been sacked), the heat is on Morris from an incriminating document that has found its way to the Guardian-style Sentinel. This involves a scratchily plotted suicide bombing of a Blackburn mosque which vies for attention with the missing pooch. A familiar sounding pin-striped executive (Peter Bourke) applies more pressure and sinks to his knees to recite the Lord’s Prayer, Morris wincing at the awfulness of the modern version.

Verity is on the rack, too, because of her gargantuan expenses, but this play is not so much about phone-hacking, expenses scandals or the Leveson Enquiry as an apocalyptic view of the cheapening and decline of society itself: the rot set in with Elvis, Morris reckons; Mary Whitehouse and Malcolm Muggeridge were the last of the moral vertebrates, and there’s now only under-age rutting, the polytechnics and tossers "who know nothing about newspapers."

Though not quite on a par with Lambert Le Roux in Hare and Brenton’s Pravda, Hicks still has a ball with this blinkered bigot who claims to speak for England but acts like a childish psychopath, and Higgins, as an all too recognisable first lady of Fleet Street (who’s lost half a foot in a landmine explosion), quietly laments the ghost town of her industry, the death of Soho and the Russian take-over of Mayfair; all true in the mourning echo.

Clarion runs at the Arcola Theatre until 16 May 2015