Frank Langella in Frost/Nixon
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The face has it—Frank Langella's, that is—and that will be enough for many when it comes to
Frost/Nixon, a facile if entertaining enough play lifted out of its over-expository rut courtesy of Langella's revelatory reading of America's late, disgraced 37th president. Why the face? Because television and film writer Peter Morgan's debut play builds to a tête-à-tête whose impact depends on a held close-up in full confessional mode (Morgan is enough of a dab celluloid hand to allow video to do its bit) of the two-time Tony winner. Indeed, Langella's London appearance here scores a high-water mark when it comes to visiting American thesps and should banish forever in the actor's own mind his previous U.K. stage forays opposite Joan Collins in
Over the Moon (formerly
Moon Over Buffalo) and in the touring production of the grimly titled
Abracadaver. Throw in a typically astute, uncaricatured turn by Welshman Michael Sheen as the master interlocutor David (now Sir David) Frost, and you have a play whose stars command attention even if the writing sometimes does not.
Morgan's theatrical modus operandi goes heavy on direct address to the audience, albeit accompanied by frequent bits of film footage as if to suggest that Frost/Nixon might, in fact, be happier on the large or small screen: the same writer's script for Stephen Frears' new film The Queen, with Helen Mirren as HRH and Sheen playing Tony Blair, is generating Oscar buzz, while his TV collaboration with Frears on The Deal—also starring Sheen as Blair—remains one of the banner British telefilms of recent years. Though various members of the mostly male cast get a chance to occupy centre-stage, the bulk of the narration falls to Elliot Cowan's James Reston Jr., the American journalist and scholar who was one of the team of three hired to advise Frost on the 1977 interviews that made TV history: never before had a president publicly apologised for his misdeeds and certainly not before a public primed for action. Four hundred million people had already watched Nixon's resignation speech three years earlier.
Morgan's thesis—that the Frost/Nixon interviews—defined an intersection of politics and showbiz that these days we take for granted isn't particularly startling, perhaps because, well, these days we take such things for granted. On the other hand, while parallels can (and will) be drawn between an American president having to account for an unpopular war and a fondness for wiretapping—sound familiar?—the play also makes plain how far things have moved on (or, more accurately, regressed) in the decades since. While Frost here is seen sharpening a style of go-for-the-jugular political interview at which the British still specialise, Nixon's willingness to submit to such scrutiny is simply unimaginable in the era of George W. Bush, who, by contrast, has kept encounters with the press to a micromanaged minimum.
Michael Sheen in Frost/Nixon
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Morgan rather belabors how much both sides have to gain (or lose) from their televisual face-off. Frost is confronting dwindling journalistic influence—his Australian toehold is cancelled at a crucial moment in the play late on—and is busy shrugging off a playboy image here drolly reinforced in an encounter in which he makes advances on a fellow air traveller, Caroline (Lydia Leonard), who ends up joining his entourage in their California sojourn to meet the president. Nixon has even more at stake, namely, what history will make of a self-denying crook who isn't a natural child of the TV age: to wit, he sweats in an environment where perspiration is a far greater crime than a missing 18 minutes of tape. In a drunken phone call from Nixon to Frost that is entirely Morgan's invention, the president speaks of the two celebrities sharing a common tragedy—to feel small in the eyes of an essentially snobbish world, no matter how high they climb in their careers.
With that in mind, their joint fate is to end up confronting what Nixon describes as "the limelight" or "the wilderness," and Michael Grandage's production generates considerable suspense as to which will win out, even if the outcome was known long ago. One can see, too, what might have attracted the director of Evita to this project: both works concern world leaders adored by some and reviled by others, while Morgan's structure is oddly Evita-esque, down to the closing news account of Nixon's burial which directly parallels the report of Eva Peron's in the West End musical. Nor is this play any more penetrating than the Andrew Lloyd Webber/Tim Rice extravaganza: Morgan writes in broad flourishes, sometimes risibly so ("Jeez, I guess it all boils down to Watergate, huh?" says Nixon in a rhetorical question that doesn't sound remotely believable), while knowing enough to give his performers pride of place. And two sterling performers they are, too.
After his joint turns as Blair and recently on TV as Kenneth Williams, Sheen needs no build-up as a master of slipping into the skin of the famous, always in a way that honours the actual person without pastiching him. There's a moment or two of fun to be had at the expense of Frost's thicket of hair and vaguely flouncy manner (his Italian shoes aren't all that seem effeminate), but the performance deepens into a study in a fame that risks devaluation—even if the canonisation of Frost at the close seems somewhat over-the-top, as if to appease the one of the central pair who is still living. Langella, in a word, is sensational, his imposing stature at elegant odds with a deep, low burr of a voice, Nixon's trademark gestures (the V-sign) played not for camp but for insights into a man at once pathetic and here deserving against the odds of pathos. A thriller whose denouement is preordained, Frost/Nixon fields the genuine thrill that comes when two actors from either side of the pond lock horns in a battle that—unlike their forbears—Langella and Sheen both win.
Frost/Nixon
By Peter Morgan
Directed by Michael Grandage
Donmar Warehouse