Tracey Wilson’s ‘The Story’ explores race, murder, and journalism

Moving between experimental theatrical split stages, humour and grief, The Story asks who decides what makes news, who gets to report it, and how a story changes depending on who is looking.

*This review contains spoilers 

Tracey Scott Wilson’s The Story, written in 2003 and recently staged at London’s National Theatre, opens with a group of Black girls singing in a community centre. 

Their voices are interrupted by a white woman giving a police statement, her white husband sitting in shadow beside her as she recounts his murder. The couple, teachers who had chosen to work in a predominantly Black neighbourhood, hoping to prove to their parents it was not dangerous. 

But when they lose their way, the woman becomes increasingly frightened. Her husband is shot, and the struggle over who gets to tell “the story” begins.

Inspired by Janet Cooke, the Black American journalist whose fabricated reporting in 1980 won a Pulitzer Prize that was later revoked, Wilson’s play explores the politics of race both on the streets and in the newsroom. 

Yvonne, an ambitious young reporter involved with the trust-fund baby and wealthy head of the newsroom, wants to do more than “just tell Black stories”. Yet she’s assigned to Vanguard, which highlights stories about Black communities. 

Pat, Vanguard’s editor-in-chief, has spent years fighting for more truthful – but also optimistic-  representations of Black communities. She recalls the paper’s past failures: a Black man wrongly accused of murder, his photograph plastered across front pages – and the paper’s refusal to publish a correction, despite the consequences this had for the innocent man’s life. 

Which stories are worth telling?

Journalistic objectivity is often treated as an unquestionable virtue, founded on the belief that events can be reported neutrally. Yet neutrality assumes that facts speak for themselves. Writing about a miners’ picket line in 1974, cultural theorist Stuart Hall argued that the same scene can carry radically different meanings for strikers, the government, police, and people of different classes. Facts may be verifiable; their selection, framing and interpretation are never neutral.

Wilson dramatises this divide through the aftermath of the shooting. Black men, then Black women, are scapegoated and arrested en masse, until tensions erupt into riots. We never learn who killed the teacher. Instead, we see how the demand for a culprit produces its own narrative, and its own victims.

The play complicates matters further when Yvonne’s account appears to be fabricated. Pat, despite knowing the truth, chooses not to expose her. Is this loyalty to a larger struggle, a refusal to fuel racist assumptions about Black journalists, or professional self-interest? After years of being overlooked, Vanguard finally has a story that commands attention. The newsroom’s desire to correct an unjust narrative becomes entangled with its desire to be seen.

These questions extend beyond the American setting. In Britain, journalism’s claims to objectivity are shaped by who holds editorial power and whose perspective is treated as universal. Reuters Institute research finds that 90% of UK journalists are white and 71% grew up in privileged households. 

The relentless scrutiny of the late academic Jason Arday, who faced hundreds of articles about allegations concerning his work and life before his death, likewise raises questions about whose reputations become news. In the US, research cited by Mona Chalabi found that terrorist attacks by Muslim perpetrators received 357% more coverage than those by non-Muslims, even though far-right extremists were linked to nearly twice as many terror incidents between 2008 and 2016.

Who appears in the news also shapes who feels it is for them. Research by the UK’s communications regulator found disengagement among younger and minority-ethnic audiences, who felt either absent from coverage or unfairly represented when included. Representation is therefore not simply a question of hiring more diverse reporters, but of rethinking which stories are deemed worth telling.

Pat wants to break from the relentless negative portrayal of Black communities. But must black or people of colour journalists then prove their communities are good? How can they resist an exoticising gaze without replacing one prescribed narrative with another? Surely there must be room for stories that are neither flattering nor damning, but simply true.

For all its layered questions, The Story does not always translate its ambition into compelling theatre. At times, the split-stage structure and densely packed ideas compete rather than cohere. Still, Wilson leaves us with a troubling paradox: even stories intended to challenge injustice can distort the truth when the politics of telling them become more important than the facts.