LONDON — The face of the future is masked in shadows in the opening moments of “Ink,” James Graham’s hit play here about the transformation of British journalism in the late 1960s. But there’s no mistaking the imperative urgency in the voice of the ominously backlighted figure on the stage of the Almeida Theater, nor the Australian twang that animates his favored four-letter words.

“OK, listen — you listening?” he hisses. “Good, cause I want to tell you a story.” And you really should listen to this insistent voice from the past. It belongs to one of the master architects of the culture you now inhabit.

His name? Rupert Murdoch, who is embodied with fascinatingly seductive brashness by Bertie Carvel in “Ink” — which transfers from the fertile little Almeida, in North London, to the Duke of York’s Theater in the West End next month — one of a host of productions here that look to the past to consider the uneasy state of the present.

Or to quote from Mick Jagger’s new, peppy dirge of a song, “England Lost”: “It’s déjà vu, I’ve seen it all before/Different season, same score.” Many of London’s playmakers could be said to be humming a similar tune.