Rupert Murdoch holds

a knife in his hand. He sits in a posh restaurant, praising the virtues of doing as he pleases.

“I like moving around, never in one place long enough,” he says, a napkin tucked into his collar to catch the drippings from a nearly raw steak he consumes. There is a flash of steel from the knife, which he points with menace at a dining companion. “Isn’t that the joy of a hotel? You can check in, turn it over, spill a glass of wine, take a shit in the toilet, fuck in the bed, make a mess, and then leave. And someone else cleans it up after; isn’t that wonderful?”

This conversation is taking place 40 feet from where I sit, though I should clarify that an actor is playing Murdoch, and another actor is playing the editor of one of his British tabloids, The Sun. The relationship between the two — the powerful master and his willing surrogate — is explored in a play called “Ink” that opens this week on Broadway. If you want to understand the mentality of the multibillionaire who has done more than any other person to spread far-right extremism in America, you should see this play, though it stumbles before the considerable task of exposing in its fullness the harm machine that is Keith Rupert Murdoch.

How, after all, does one capture in a play or a movie — or even a book that doesn’t gallop past 500 pages — the long life and dismal work of this 88-year-old mogul? At the age of 21, when his father died, Murdoch inherited two small newspapers in Australia and spun them into a media empire in his native land. He then moved to England and acquired more assets there, including the flower of the establishment, the Times of London, while creating from scratch a satellite television network. His media properties were instrumental in the rise and fall of several prime ministers, and they played a key role in fomenting the nationalist ire that led to Britain voting to leave the European Union. One of his newspapers, the News of the World, also engaged in a criminal campaign of hacking into the voicemails of celebrities, members of the royal family, and ordinary citizens; this led to a parliamentary committee declaring Murdoch unfit to run a major corporation.

And we haven’t even gotten to America and Fox News, which Murdoch founded in 1996.

The strength of “Ink” is that it reveals a key tactic of Murdoch’s: disruption by proxy. The play’s main character isn’t really Murdoch but Larry Lamb, the chip-on-his-shoulder journalist hired to turn the boring Sun into a sensationalist tabloid. Although Murdoch enjoys visiting his newsrooms, he is not the editor-in-chief of any of his publications; he appoints the people who are, in essence, his shock troops. “Find people like you,” Murdoch instructs Lamb, who is building a new staff for The Sun. “The spurned, the spited, the overlooked; gather ’em up, throw ’em in. A ship of undesirables.”

