Enquirer, Mother at the Trampery, London, review A faulty moral compass, so unhelpful in every other way, makes a tremendous theme for a drama. And what with the phone-hacking scandal and the Leveson enquiry into the ethics of the British Press, the moral compass of journalism has lately seemed to be pointing anywhere but true north. This is the starting-point for the National Theatre of Scotland's portrait of the British press, as seen by 43 journalists who were interviewed by their colleagues, the writers Paul Flynn, Ruth Wishart and Deborah Orr. The resulting verbatim testimony was fashioned into a script by Vicky Featherstone and John Tiffany, who also direct, and their co-editor, the author and journalist Andrew O'Hagan. The piece, presented in partnership with the Barbican and the London Review of Books, is set in a former warehouse in Clerkenwell, soon to be refurbished into a fashionable "working envionment." The cast of four men and two women leads the audience around the building, into a "conference room," an "editor's office," and a grim, fluorescent-lit "newsroom," authentically enlivened by a dartboard in the shape of a busty female. Within the loose framing device of a day in the working life of a newspaper, the "journalists" give accounts of their trade, from the robustly pragmatic (Jack Irvine, the launch editor of the Scottish Sun, describes the "black book" in which he kept a list of payments to sources) to the wearily cynical (Roger Alton, the executive editor of the Times, resolutely declines to offer anything as tangible as an opinion, to the fury of his interviewer, Deborah Orr). There are some bleak moments - war reporter Ros Wynne-Jones recalls how her story of a massacre in East Timor was pushed off the front page by the wedding of Prince Edward and Sophie Rhys-Jones - and a glorious vignette in which a cupboard is flung open to reveal a Guardian journalist recounting her vivid nightmare of kicking Bryan Ferry to death. The intimate details of the lives of others are always fascinating, and the excellent ensemble cast conveys the curious journalistic mixture of brutal cynicism and marshmallow sentimentality with eerie accuracy. But much of the self-lacerating outrage over the alleged wrongs of Rupert Murdoch, the toxic brilliance of the Daily Mail and the general gloom about the future of newspapers feels rather more like journalistic saloon-bar gossip than revelation. Not that journalists get much chance to visit the saloon bar these days, poor things.