James Graham is theatre’s canniest cultural archaeologist. He’s constantly unearthing overlooked modern-historical moments. He’s not a risqué writer; he’s motivated by a desire to inform and entertain. Yet his works aren’t ‘safe’; he’s drawn to material that has a kind of radioactive quality. He identifies episodes that have fundamentally changed us in some way.
Best of Enemies, his typically insightful, well-researched and compelling new play, is a departure in that he takes us to America, circa 1968. Previously, he has been drawn to dramatising staging-posts in British socio-political life, whether that be Thatcher’s childhood, Eden during Suez, parliament in the mid-70s (This House), or, on TV, the machinations before the EU referendum (Brexit: The Uncivil War).
He’s openly indebted here to a 2015 US documentary film of the same name, which delved back into the fevered televised set-tos that took place in 1968 between rival intellectual figureheads of the American left and right. That riot-torn summer, during the Republican and Democrat conventions in Miami Beach and Chicago – which decided candidates for that year’s presidential election – Gore Vidal and William F Buckley Jr were asked to take part in a televised series of related debates, aired by ABC.
Graham starts with the bombshell moment, in the 10th debate, when Buckley ventured beyond the usual line of casually witty sniping between the two men, and let loose a homophobic slur in outraged response to Vidal’s suggestion about his being a crypto-fascist. We see David Harewood’s Buckley and Charles Edwards’s Vidal twisting in neighbouring seats on a podium in stunned silence at the verbal violence just unleashed. The full exchange itself, though, is only enacted in the second half.
Graham first rewinds to show how they came to be conjoined in debate in the first place and the build-up to that eruption of verbal toxicity. The evening offers a simple – but no less truthful for that – thesis that here was the birth of televised political discussion as blood-sport. The route towards the ratings-chasing TV news outlets of today, and more broadly, our age’s online name-calling and trolling is all too apparent.
As with the most comparable plays of his – Ink, about Murdoch and Fleet Street, and Quiz, looking at audience manipulation on the back of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? – Graham crams in a lot of exposition, albeit he sneaks in his homework via a fittingly Sixties collage-style of enjoyable, fleeting vignettes.
There’s a touch of overload in the pop-up cameos – Andy Warhol and Aretha Franklin crop up, as do, more incongruously, Enoch Powell and British activist Tariq Ali. But the production (co-produced with Headlong) is directed with flair and flurries of period sounds by Jeremy Herrin, who ranges the audience as if in a TV studio and at times has actors syncing their speeches with related film footage.
A lot of ground is covered, but though there are notable interjections from playwright James Baldwin (a wise, wry Syrus Lowe), we hear too little from black America, not to mention the angry young railing at Vietnam.
The leads, though, excel. Harewood – in a striking, thought-provoking instance of quasi colour-blind casting – doesn’t replicate the amused loftiness that Buckley took pains to display, but he has intellectual force and vigour; we see him shifting up a gear to respond to the threat-level, strategizing as the stakes get higher. Likewise, Charles Edwards’s cool, urbane Vidal shifts from off-hand egotist to more urgent emissary of America’s salvation. Their particular battle is long over, yet on – even so – it rages.
Until Jan 22. Tickets: 020 7922 2922; youngvic.org
