Baffling piffle
Lloyd Evans
Frost/Nixon Gielgud The Lightning Play Almeida Drunk Enough To Say I Love You? Royal Court Baffling. That’s all I can say about Frost/Nixon. The critics have greeted the West End debut of Peter Morgan as if some new Ibsen had appeared among us, but I’m afraid the show is a load of tedious lightweight tosh. Sure, Morgan deserves credit for conjuring a serviceable drama out of two minutes of TV footage recorded 29 years ago in which Tricky Dicky finally admitted that he’d broken the law. That was the only moment worth watching in Frost’s achingly boring set of interviews. And Michael Sheen, who is contractually obliged to appear in everything Morgan writes, does an effectively simpering takeoff of David Frost. He’s almost as good as Mike Yarwood. But Frank Langella is all wrong as Nixon. No one’s bothered to flatten or darken his silver quiff and he plays Tricky Dicky as a relaxed, charming and slightly camp nightclub crooner bantering with the crowd between songs. Nixon? No, Max Bygraves. And the play seems to be written for an audience of bored halfwits.
Unnamed characters bustle in and out helping us interpret the progress of the interviews, drawing our attention, for example, to Frost’s anxiety that Nixon is being very dull and evasive. Why is he being very dull and evasive? Er, on purpose. Wow, what a genius. And the takehome message is that showbiz and politics are intimately related. ‘Perhaps Frost understood that better than any of us.’ Did he now. Well, I never. The woman beside me (in a packed theatre, I hasten to add) slept throughout. Perhaps she was dreaming about the perfect actor to play Nixon when the show leapfrogs to New York. That pale, puffy slab of a face, those dark restless eyes, and that uneasy air of ambition and truculence mingled with obscure resentments — Gordon Brown, of course. But I fear he’ll be busy playing himself on a wider stage than Broadway.
The Lightning Play is a hugely enjoyable muddle. The set-up is familiar enough. A metropolitan couple are haunted by their secret past. But Charlotte Jones makes basic errors. There’s a daft contrivance in which a dysfunctional TV broadcasts images of a child which are visible to only one character. And she spends ages setting up a drinks party where all the wrong people meet and bicker. No need for the Byzantine arrangements, just bundle the characters on stage and let the fun begin. And once it does, the play soars. The final act is brilliantly observed, horribly moving and absolutely hilarious. The cast are so good you want to take them home so that your friends can laugh at them too. Best of all is Katherine Parkinson whose slovenly twanging drawl is both seductive and faintly needling. Not a classic but a pretty good night out.
Caryl Churchill’s new play is a must for anyone interested in hate. Hate can be a good thing, if channelled effectively. In the last three decades successful hate campaigns have altered our society’s attitude to racists, homophobes, paedophiles and wife-beaters. But hate can be ugly and dangerous. Consider the strange new campaign aimed at the owners of cars whose engines deliver thrust to both axles simultaneously, i.e., 4x4s. It seems bonkers to despise your neighbour because of his car’s transmission system but that’s the joy of hate. It is bonkers. And gloriously random, too, setting us free from the cage of reason, and delivering a delicious double thrill. Even as we vilify our target, so we are purified. Caryl Churchill hates Britain and America and her play is a critique of transatlantic foreign policy. Two gay men, one older and British, the other younger and American, sit on a sofa reminiscing, with much merry laughter, about atrocities perpetrated by both nations. The premise is that US–UK foreign policy aims only to slaughter as many people as possible. So why all those nukes rusting unused in their bunkers, eh? But this isn’t a play that questions its own assumptions, it’s an inflexible and self-righteous caricature. The dialogue is artful, fractured and highly polished, and Churchill is wise enough to know that her repetitive skit can’t sustain an audience’s interest for long. The actors rip through the text in 40 minutes and that’s it. Standing ovations. But not from me. This is the sort of play the Bolsheviks would have written about the tsars, or the SS about the Jews. Caryl Churchill may think she’s a socialist but she writes like a national socialist. Ah, how I hated it. Oh, how I vilify it. Gosh, how it purified me.
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