Playwright Tracey Scott Wilson's 2003 breakthrough work, The Story, is making its London debut at the National Theatre, more than two decades after it was inspired by the real-life case of Janet Cooke, a young Black American reporter at the Washington Post who was exposed as a fraud in 1981 after winning (and then having to return) a Pulitzer prize for a fabricated story. Wilson, who grew up discussing the nightly news with her family, says she was struck early on by how coverage of the scandal intersected with race, and later by how outlets such as Fox News drifted from objective reporting towards partisan framing, making her decades-old play feel newly relevant in today's debates about fake news and media trust.

The play follows Yvonne, an ambitious, Ivy League-educated Black junior reporter confined to a section designed to offset negative news about the Black community with positive stories, who pursues a bigger scoop to break into the mostly white, male national desk. Wilson says she was drawn to questions of authenticity, class and who is deemed a legitimate voice within the Black community, themes sharpened by the play's original 2003 run coinciding with the unrelated Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal at the New York Times. She has also reworked the character of Pat, a senior Black female editor, to explore how both women are punished for their ambition, following an earlier, aborted attempt to bring the play to London's Soho Theatre.