Peter Morgan
FROST/NIXON
Donmar Warehouse
History as an account of past events is sometimes not enough for us: we are trained as an audience that likes to see dramas made out of crises. The Donmar’s production of Frost/Nixon revisits not the original Watergate political mini-series itself, but the attempt a few years afterward to bring closure to it with a series of interviews featuring the disgraced male lead. Peter Morgan, author of The Deal, has told the story of these encounters with a smart, old-fashioned (and always welcome) sense of pace and resolution.
A quick scan of the audience on opening night suggested that few were old enough to have followed Watergate as it unfolded. But Morgan and the director, Michael Grandage, invoke it here in an artfully lean production that has room for such touches as Frost’s postmodern taste in shirts and Nixon’s blazered formality. Michael Sheen’s Frost is the celebrity television journalist whose speciality is celebrity itself, the connoisseurship of fame and the famous. It is a deft portrayal with enough references to remind us of the Frost we know, while avoiding any lapse into impersonation.
The figure dominating the stage, however, is Frank Langella’s Nixon, a commanding performance that should get the attention of West End professional prizegivers when the time comes for balloting. It is a measure of his skill that an actor of such grace and presence can move us in portraying a man legendary for his woodenness and wordy banality. Langella, too, has borrowed just enough from the real figure to serve his purpose, producing a theatrical creation which engages us on its own terms.
As the play opens Frost is in a career slump: he has lost his American show and his place in the muster of A-list New Yorkers. Needing something that will return him to favour with the maître d’ at Sardi’s, he proposes a television interview with the former President, now condemned to internal exile and stewing in obscurity. To his surprise, Nixon accepts. But there is a price, and celebrity at presidential level does not come cheap – indeed, no cheaper, it seems, than $600,000. Like other canny headliners, Nixon has engaged Swifty Lazar, a byword in entertainment commerce, to look after his interests. Frost needs career revival and Nixon needs the money, and a deal is struck between the chatmeister of Swinging London and the uptight Coriolanus of San Clemente. The contest will be something on the lines of courtroom drama, although given Frost’s style of quizzical confidentiality, it promises to be more periphrastic than Perry Mason. Frost soon finds himself facing financial ruin as advertising sponsorship is slow to arrive, and he must be careful not to frighten Nixon off and wreck the project. Wodehouse aptly observed that it is better to avoid apologies: the right sort of people do not want them, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them. But Frost’s team grows uneasy with his failure to turn up the heat. Journalists Jim Reston and Bob Zelnick (forcefully played by Elliot Cowan and Vincent Marzello) hope finally to extract some measure of expiation from the former President who, more reviled than any since Lincoln, has resisted public confession of his sins and done no more penance for them than that imposed on him by social ostracism and golf.
Rufus Wright’s young John Birt worries about financial and public relations downsides: a policy wonk in the making. But Nixon, too, is taking a risk. He and his faithful aide (Corey Johnson) hardly worry about adding new revelations to the already bulging public file, but they do fear the ex-President might wind up in the prime-time pillory that they suspect Frost’s people have in mind. As the interviews proceed, the Nixon team’s fears recede. A veteran of stand-offs with the Washington press corps, and a lifelong expert in stonewalling platitudes and ruthless non sequiturs, Nixon handles himself well. Frost’s team becomes alarmed, wondering if the interviews might just become a launch pad for Nixon’s rehabilitation rather than a substitute for the trial he had been spared.
Frost is saving his roundhouse punch for the last encounter. He has, of course, an armoury of smoking guns to choose from and the final encounter quickly declines from civilized colloquy to something like an excerpt from the Today programme. Nixon’s composure cracks and his face, distorted by self-knowledge fighting with self-pity, is rebroadcast on a huge screen above the stage: a television studio becomes his Golgotha. Langella skilfully engages us in the character’s personal anguish, but still leaves us with the sense that Nixon’s remorse ultimately derived as much from letting himself down, as from failing his party, his office and his country.
It is unlikely that the Frost interviews closed off Nixon’s possible return to public life – that, surely, was beyond even his Houdini powers of political survival. Ben Bradlee, Nixon’s nemesis when Editor of the Washington Post, once observed that Nixon lacked “instinctive intelligence”, but was nonetheless “knowledgeable about a great many things”. In David Frost, who had never voted in his life, Nixon met someone who knew one big thing: the power of the moving image. Lurking behind the great public issues of presidential power and political propriety, there was a story of human, rather than political, interest. At the end, anticipating Neil Postman among many others, Reston sums up the lesson of the evening, and perhaps comments on the play in which he figures: it is tough to tell where the politics stopped and the showbiz started. Maybe that was the point. Maybe, in the end, there is no difference – something that Frost understood better than all of us.
