In this stimulating, freewheeling new play, James Graham traces today’s culture wars back to the TV debates between conservative commentator William F Buckley Jr and the patrician, liberal gay writer Gore Vidal during the Republican and Democrat conventions of 1968. If the political parallels between then and now sometimes feel too on the nose – concerns about social justice, or freedom to protest - it’s probably contemporary reality that’s at fault rather than Graham and his director, Jeremy Herrin. That was certainly the case with their prescient This House, about the UK hung Parliaments of the 1970s, 10 years ago.
Anyway, the new show’s format – talking-head centrepieces against a backdrop of social and personal turmoil - recalls Peter Morgan’s Frost/Nixon but it’s more wildly ambitious and theatrical. Not least because the charismatic black actor David Harewood plays the very white Buckley. This is one means by which Graham and Herrin discuss artifice, empathy and identity. Harewood has been lost to US TV shows like Homeland and Supergirl for some years: it’s great to see him back on the British stage, in a role he embraces as if wrestling a python.
I’d guess that Buckley is little remembered and Vidal little read now but in the febrile days of the late 60s they counted as public intellectuals. ABC hoped to boost its poor market share by introducing elevated opinion into neutral news, but the duo’s live head-to-heads quickly descended into showboating, rancour, and an eventual exchange of the angry slurs “crypto-Nazi” and “queer”. On stage a slightly awkward epilogue, where the long-dead characters muse on the past, draws a direct line to Donald Trump’s election.
A bold claim, but this play deals in arresting ideas and images. Graham crams in a lot of exposition and incidental detail, including cameos from Aretha Franklin, Andy Warhol and a fantastically camp James Baldwin. But it’s fascinating stuff: that epilogue also catalogues the time it took other profanities to reach the screen (apparently it was just a year to the first mother f***er). And many comparisons between 1968 and today are undeniable. Angry protests and police crackdowns? Check. Elite figures on both sides claiming to speak for the underclass? Check. Rich, white men feeling oppressed? Double check.
Harewood is tremendous as Buckley, finding a dignified core beneath the man’s posturing and extravagant facial tics. There’s a frisson when the character interviews Enoch Powell about race, but you pretty soon forget about skin colour. Charles Edwards’s Vidal, meanwhile, is a monster of silky complacency whose “waspish spontaneity [is] always rehearsed”. He’s also deliciously flustered and inarticulate when Buckley finally finds his weak spot.
The supporting cast play multiple parts, often segueing into real life footage of Bobby Kennedy or Walter Cronkite projected onto the TV edit suite designer Bunny Christie has built above the stage. Herrin’s production, co-produced by Headlong Theatre, is dynamic but rough around the edges, with some small fluffs on opening night. But a slightly imperfect new James Graham play will always be streets ahead of the competition.
Young Vic, to January 2; youngvic.org
