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A teacher in Alan Bennett’s The History Boys says that “there is no period so remote as the recent past”, suggesting that such events are caught between the fallible memories of those involved and the ignorance of those not yet taught about them at school.

That problem was visible at In the Print, Robert Khan and Tom Salinsky’s docudrama about the 1986-87 stand-off between Rupert Murdoch, aiming to reform newspaper production, and Brenda Dean, general secretary of the print union Sogat (the Society of Graphical and Allied Trades). Theatregoers ranged from Lord Kinnock – Labour party leader at the time depicted – to viewers barely born when Murdoch’s News of the World ceased publication in 2011.

Khan and Salinsky’s previous plays include Kingmaker (a 2014 spin on Boris Johnson) and last year’s superb The Gang of Three, about Labour’s leadership fights in the 1970s and early 80s. Briskly staged by Josh Roche, In the Print is a thriller tensely turning on subterfuge, including Murdoch’s use of a fake newspaper, The London Post, to explain the existence of the Wapping plant where his regular titles would in fact be printed with a deunionised workforce.

Some minor players are caricatured – Trades Union Congress boss Norman Willis, a poetry lover, is shown reciting sonnets at press conferences – and the script sometimes succumbs to the risk in recent-event theatre of easy hindsight irony: as when someone comments that the Labour party’s new director of communications, “Peter” (Mandelson), seems a reliable type. The biggest laugh comes from Kinnock’s joke about mining union leader Arthur Scargill going from a big union and a small house to a small union and a big house.

Stage dramatisations of Murdoch range from James Graham’s fair-minded Ink (2017), about his first year as owner of the Sun, to last year’s off-Broadway Murdoch: The Final Interview by an anonymous writer who depicted the tycoon as a Trump-enabling Satan. In the Print is most energised by Murdoch’s wrecking-ball contempt for British conventions. A key line has him telling Dean that he is more of a revolutionary than leftwing union members.

With light impersonation, Alan Cox suggests a combination of pragmatist and fanatic in Murdoch. The natural likability of Claudia Jolly’s Dean gives some surprising actions even more impact. Russell Bentley brightly pairs a dirty-motor-mouthed Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie with an Australian apparatchik of Murdoch.

The play largely leaves audiences to decide whether Dean – like Scargill just before her – was outplayed by a cleverer figure in the capitalist establishment (Murdoch her Thatcher) or if militant trade unionism, hobbled by Thatcherite reforms, was already played out. The mantra that “nobody wants yesterday’s newspapers” allowed unions (until Wapping) to make exceptional demands to keep the presses running. Again, Khan and Salinsky have made yesterday’s news a headline event.

• At King’s Head theatre, London, until 3 May