In these post-truth times, these days of shamelessness, when Donald Trump’s surrogates coin terms like “alternative facts” and slogans like ‘truth isn’t truth’, it strikes me as curious that no one has thought to restage Howard Brenton and David Hare’s Pravda.

This occurred to me recently while reading the New Yorker’s review of The Lifespan of a Fact, a new play by Jeremy Kareken, David Murrell, and Gordon Farrell, which opened on Broadway earlier this month. The play is based (loosely, which seems fitting) on 2012 book of the same name, which detailed the long-running e-mail confrontation (seven years in reality, five days, and in person, in the play) between the writer John D’Agata and Jim Fingal, an intern at the magazine The Believer, who had been assigned to fact-check D’Agata’s piece about a teenager who committed suicide by leaping from a Las Vegas hotel ten years earlier. There were, it goes without saying, more than a few discrepancies in D’Agata’s account. ‘Okay, he says that on the day Levi died, “lap dancing was temporarily banned by the city”, but that doesn’t check out,’ Jim (played by Daniel Radcliffe in the Broadway production) tells his editor (who is also invented). ‘The day before Levi died, the Las Vegas Sun wrote about a possible upcoming ban on touching strippers in fully nude establishments, but there’s nothing about a possible ban on lap dancing altogether in topless or even so-called go-go bars, where nipple nudity is essentially banned, but of course establishments get around that using pasties…’