Before going to see `Frost/Nixon` the movie, which went on nationwide release here yesterday, I thought I would revisit my review of the stage production of it almost exactly a couple of years ago. So here it is, as it was posted on the Africana/Orientalia site on 7 February 2007 (Message #18572). I will then compare it with the screen version in due course.
"`Frost/Nixon` has been playing at London`s Gielgud Theatre for the last six months, and is now about to transfer to New York`s Broadway. It has been much acclaimed by professional critics here. Seeing it at the weekend, one could understand why. It is simply sensational. American audiences will surely be enthralled and entertained in equal measure.
The play of course is about and based on the Frost / Nixon interviews in the spring of 1977. It is docu-drama par excellence, with a theatrical aura that perfectly fits and depicts the two principal characters, but without any artificial or imaginative additions. It is realism at its most natural; the history it portrays needed no embellishments.
But first some background: by the mid-`70s, David Frost, the British tv personality, now an al-Jazeera news anchorman and a freelance broadcaster based in London, with `gravitas` befitting an elder media statesman, was already an established trans-Atlantic celebrity. Then he was the `playboy` talkshow host, with his own programme series on both sides of the water, and even `down under` in Australia. At that particular point however his career was somewhat on the slide. By some extraordinary luck, or clever manipulation (take your pick) he managed to secure an exclusive interview with Richard Nixon who promised him that it would be "with no holds barred". Nixon too was suffering from a lack of purpose and focus after his downfall. In this respect, both interlocutor and subject needed each other to boost their morale.
So the play begins with the the ground work and build-up to the main event. We see him at work, getting a team together of old friends (like John Birt, who was later to become Director General of the BBC), negotiating the deal with Nixon, whom he paid $600,000 (financed from his own private resources, since at that stage no networks were interested), with both parties advisers fretting over the finer details of the package. This was settled as a sequence of four one-hour sessions, covering different aspects of Nixon`s presidency. One of these was `Watergate`, the exact parameters of which were later to be in contention but resolved with much mutual posturing and threats of litigation. One half of the play is taken up by these preliminaries, and then come the interviews proper, but we sit through a two hour production without a break for an interval, an extraordinary feat sustained by the sheer power of the narrative!
The encounters between the two men are the mainstay of the story. In the first three, Nixon gets the better of Frost. He gives away nothing of importance; there are no damning revelations, no admissions of culpability. Both of them however observe the courtesies of the game while seeking to strike or defend and score or shield points. It is as if we are witnessing a verbal, albeit sedentary, boxing match; after every round, so to speak, they retreat into their respective corners, to confer and be coached by their aides. To Frost`s allies, the project seems doomed; his eternal self-assurance is under threat. On the eve of the fourth and last session, there is much soul-searching and even a nocturnal phone conversation between the two men which may or may not have taken place in reality but which set the scene for the final denouement. And so in the last telling quarter hour, the punch line is delivered; Nixon is cornered and `confesses` his guilt; he is confronted with evidence that he cannot deny. This is best left unexplored here, for even though the facts are already on record and too well known, what matters is their dramatization- so gripping and expertly done. But lest it be thought otherwise, despite all that we know about Nixon`s political disgrace, personality defects and moral foibles, it is his own candid self-analysis of his character and acceptance of blame, in hindsight, that is so disarming. He thus comes across, paradoxically, as an honourable man because, as he explains, during the only emotional outburst that we see, he wasn`t going to shop his closest associates to the Feds when he learnt of their wrong-doing, because you just don`t do that to your own people. And his answer to the basic question, "why did you not destroy the (White House) tapes?" was also rational and convincing, namely that the system had been put in place by his predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, and protocol and public interest demanded that it be continued.
The play`s author is Peter Morgan, a veteran and accomplished writer of many tv and movie scripts, though this was his first stage production. Frost is played superbly by Michael Sheen, the same actor who played Tony Blair against Helen Mirren in (his, Morgan`s `The Queen`, about the relationship between monarch and prime minister at the time of Princess Diana`s death. His other major achievement was `The Deal` (supposed to have been agreed between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown when Blair became leader of the Labour Party in 1994). So Morgan is past master at capturing both the minutiae and the nuances of political posturing, dialogue and relationships, all of which is evident here. Frank Lingella`s rendering of Nixon is equally impressive, and while remaining a little too controlled throughout, it softened just enough, in the last scenes, to give us a glimpse of the emotional turmoil of his `alter ego` as he came to terms with his fate.
More topically, for us in Britain, the possible analogy with what may yet happen to Tony Blair, who is soon due to go into the wilderness and will surely be judged by his hubristic handling of the Iraq affair and other foreign policies and who also could be damaged by the `cash for honours` investigation currently under way, was just too compelling and provided an exciting backdrop to a memorable experience.
To New Yorkers and those in the vicinity, I would say: don`t miss this, book your tickets now. It will be a unique opportunity to revisit the Frost / Nixon interviews almost exactly 30 years on!
RAMNIK SHAH
Surrey, England"
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