Best of Enemies review – James Graham’s superb study of media and politics
Best of Enemies review – James Graham’s superb study of media and politicsYoung Vic, LondonDavid Harewood and Charles Edwards go head-to-head as William F Buckley Jr and Gore Vidal respectively in an enthralling play based on a 1968 TV debate James Graham specialises in pivotal political moments. This House recreated the parliamentary divisions leading to the Thatcher premiership in 1979, and Ink previewed the electoral significance of Rupert Murdoch’s 1969 takeover of the Sun newspaper.Best of Enemies examines another end-of-decade cusp: the TV debates on the ABC network during the 1968 US presidential nominating conventions, between mutually detesting American essayists: on the New Right, William F Buckley Jr and, on the New Left, Gore Vidal.In a play inspired by Morgan Neville and Robert Morgan’s 2015 documentary about the encounters, Graham suggests that these ideological antler-locking head-to-heads were influential on multiple levels – popularising bitter, unbridgeable gulfs between conservative and liberal America that still endure; making TV, rather than legislatures, the national debating chamber; and, through ABC’s Buckley-Vidal ratings triumph, creating a US peak-time triopoly – with NBC and CBS – lasting until the protagonist of Ink launched Fox News.At one very enjoyable level, Best of Enemies is – in the line of earlier Graham work and Peter Morgan’s Frost/Nixon – historical karaoke, recreating verbatim choice ideas and insults from the studio duels. The roar of complex thoughts and challenges to orthodoxy is so enthralling that it makes Radio 4’s Today programme sound like CBeebies.But Graham and director Jeremy Herrin (with characteristic pace and clarity) crucially give this media archaeology a contemporary framing. The most striking modernity is casting. Charles Edwards’ Vidal delivers a near-perfect soundalike and acceptable lookalike, while Buckley, who can be seen as the epitome of a privileged white right-winger, is portrayed by the black British actor David Harewood. He exactly captures every aspect – drawl, lolling posture, facial tics – of the Republican’s awkward broadcasting persona, except for one element in the room.As a means of equalising opportunity for actors, there is no reasonable argument against racially fluid casting. But in plays that aim elsewhere for photo-realism – the show’s Andy Warhol, Aretha Franklin and Bobby Kennedy reliably match the archives – audiences are asked to make an adjustment in how they visually read a production. When Buckley and the novelist James Baldwin are on stage together, white racism and African-American pride are simultaneously being represented by actors of colour.Apart from Harewood’s electrifying stage presence, a justification for this pictorial revisionism is that Buckley did experience a form of prejudice and institutional isolation; in a Republican party of entitled white Protestants, he was Roman Catholic. Vidal throws one jibe about the Vatican, but Graham might have made more of how the Democrat’s haughty disdain for his rival came from viewing him as a social and religious inferior and establishment interloper. Each man was, by the standards of the time, in the “wrong” party for his background: a political trend that has continued.As has another. A time-jumping epilogue suggests that the 1968 debates may have made televisual visibility such an asset to candidates that it led to hosts of Have I Got News for You? and the US version of The Apprentice running major democracies.Parts of the second half, set at the Democrat convention in Chicago, may seem over-familiar to viewers of Aaron Sorkin’s film The Trial of the Chicago 7, but Graham proves that he stands with Sorkin as our best dramatic interpreters of the interplay of media and politics.TopicsTheatreYoung VicJames GrahamDavid HarewoodGore VidalUS politicsreviewsReuse this content More
