THE Impersonator
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LIfE ANd LETTERs THE ImPERsONATOR Peter Morgan fills in the gaps of history. bY jOHN LAHR “ he one duty we owe to history is to very different kinds of people.” “I want rewrite it,” Oscar Wilde said. The to go to all the un-minuted places—bed- BritishT screenwriter and playwright rooms, Land-Rovers, private audiences,” Peter Morgan—responsible for the he told ABC News this year. To me he 2006 movie “The Queen” and for the said, “I couldn’t begin to write unless I play “Frost/Nixon,” now on Broadway could see heartbreak or human connec- (at the Bernard B. Jacobs)—agrees. His tion. I have a great deal of compassion stories, he says, “take defining moments for those in public life and what we have in recent history and allow drama to ex- done to them.” plore areas that have perhaps been ne- As a storyteller, Morgan is drawn to glected.” These areas have included the volatile, ambitious antagonists. (“Am- royal family’s response to the death of bition interests me because it’s such a Diana (“The Queen”), the rise of the surefire indicator of damage,” he said.) Ugandan dictator Idi Amin (the 2006 In “The Deal,” a drama, directed by Ste- film “The Last King of Scotland,” which phen Frears—who also directed “The Morgan co-wrote with Jeremy Brock), Queen”—about Tony Blair’s pivotal the power-sharing agreement made be- meeting with Gordon Brown, in 1994 tween Prime Minister-to-be Tony Blair at a North London restaurant, where and his future Chancellor of the Exche- they decided on the future of the La- quer Gordon Brown (in a 2003 Chan- bour Party leadership (a meeting whose nel 4 TV movie called “The Deal”), the ramifications are still playing out in prison reformer Lord Longford’s at- British politics), Morgan hit on a rich, tempt to win a pardon for the child- intellectually challenging seam of psy- murderer Myra Hindley (in another chological and political combat. “I ac- Channel 4 TV movie, titled “Longford,” tually wrote about a sort of fratricide,” and recently aired on HBO), and the he said. “That’s what interested me: combative interview between former friendship and betrayal.” In one scene, President Richard Nixon and the Brit- in which the up-and-coming politicians ish talk-show pundit David Frost are walking out of the House of Com- (“Frost/Nixon”). mons, competition and exposition play Over the past five years, Morgan, off each other deftly, as the passive-ag- who is forty-four, has become a brand gressive Blair teases the saturnine front- name. He owns the franchise on a cer- runner Brown, asking him if his reti- tain kind of scrupulously researched cence is a “specifically Scottish trait”: and astutely observed investigation into GORDON: You ask this, as a Scot yourself, the emotional ructions behind contem- of course. TONY: You may mock, but I am a Scot. porary events—neither documentary GORDON: As well as being black, and nor fiction but an imaginative amalgam working-class. of the two. Since his Academy Award TONY: I was born in Scotland. GORDON: Being born in a stable doesn’t nomination for “The Queen,” which make you a horse. has grossed more than a hundred mil- lion dollars, Morgan has been inun- The chemistry of opposition makes dated with scripts. “None of them inter- terrific drama. Morgan insists on this est me, because they’re all fact-based,” he point. “They tried to get me to write told me. What interests him is narratives about the Queen without Tony Blair,” in which real public figures are thrown he recalled of his producers on “The into unlikely relationships. His dramas Queen.” “What happened after Diana’s turn on what he has called “this odd col- death was quite interesting, and it was lection of pas de deux—dances between about Blair and the Queen. They said, 34 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 30, 2007 TNY—2007_04_30—PAGE 34—133SC. ‘For God’s sake, don’t go anywhere near ford in a trenchant exchange at the drafter I’ve ever read. If he gets it in Blair.’ So I started trying to write it with- finale, “on the moors . when we did the first draft, he’s got the movie. If he out Blair in it. I just couldn’t. It wasn’t the first one, you’d know that evil can be doesn’t get it in the first draft, he sort interesting to me. I called Stephen up a spiritual experience, too.”) In a sense, of never will.” (Morgan wrote the first and said, ‘The only way this is interest- “Frost/Nixon” (which Morgan has draft of “The Queen” in three weeks.) ing is with Blair and the Queen in con- adapted for a movie, to be directed by “I do have an innate understanding of flict—it’s sort of mothers and sons, two Ron Howard) is a perfect case study of where a story should or shouldn’t go, in different generations in two different Morgan’s style. “In the end, it’s just two a way that I don’t think can be taught,” worlds, two different Englands, two people and words,” Morgan said. In Morgan said. He has, he said, “an al- most autistic ability to see a shape in a story”: “So, in other words, ‘The Queen’ right from the get-go was: audience scene-Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday- Thursday-Friday-audience scene. Blair- Brown was: starts at the end, goes back, tells the story for two-thirds, then goes back. I lock onto a structure almost like an infant looking at colors and shapes. Once I’ve got that, I’ll never deviate from it. There are many, many things in my work that need redoing—never the structure.” Part of the trick, as Morgan under- stands it, is to move quickly “from levity to seriousness.” In this, he is well served by a sharp sense of humor. “He’s the greatest standup that never was,” Harries said. “When I first met Peter, I just wanted to put him onstage. He was Jerry Seinfeld. He was savage, and occasion- ally overstepped the mark; he lost a few friends along the way.” Morgan is a good mimic; he often gets inside his charac- ters’ minds by aping the rhythms of their speech. For “Longford,” he watched tapes of Longford’s television appear- ances until he got “a genetic print of the way he spoke.” For his current commis- Morgan says he has “compassion for those in public life and what we’ve done to them.” sion, again with Frears, a TV movie about the Derby County soccer coach different languages.’ And he got that im- Nixon and Frost, he found two explo- Brian Clough and his takeover of Leeds mediately.” Frears said, “His friends in sive, contradictory protagonists, both on United, the hated rival club, Morgan London are quite grand, so he’s writing the decline, both looking for a way to learned to write “long speeches in a sort precisely about things that he’s ob- redeem their names, one famously re- of working-class Middlesbrough ver- served.” (Morgan married Lila Schwarz- pressed and the other famously indul- nacular.” His ear for idiomatic speech enberg, an Austrian, in 1997; they and gent. “It’s like nitrogen and glycerin,” and the comedy of its weasel words is their four children live in London.) Morgan said. “Apart, they are com- enhanced by the fact that his characters Much of Morgan’s storytelling is an- pletely harmless chemicals; together, it’s rarely tell jokes as such; their humor is chored in warring dualities. “The Last a wonderful cocktail.” between the lines. “The Queen” opens King of Scotland,” in which a young, Structure is what turns Morgan’s with Elizabeth II, played by Helen Mir- adventurous Scot becomes the personal unlikely pairings into the combusti- ren, having her portrait painted by an physician to Idi Amin and unwittingly ble material we see onstage and on- artist who admits to having cast his vote gets caught up in the tyranny of his rev- screen. “History gives him an outline,” for the Conservatives: olution, explores a kind of father-son Andy Harries, the head of drama and ELIZABETH: I envy you being able to vote. conflict; in “Longford,” the vanity of a film production for Britain’s ITV, and (A beat) Not the actual ticking of the box, although it would, oh, it would be nice to would-be saint is tested by the manipu- the producer of “The Queen,” said. experience that ONCE. (A beat) But the sheer ko S ri lative projections of one of the nation’s “He’s brilliant at accessing material joy of being partial. T r E most infamous sinners. (“If you’d been and finding a plumb line through it.” rob there that night,” Hindley tells Long- Harries added, “He’s the best first- It’s part of Morgan’s mischievous power THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 30, 2007 35 TNY—2007_04_30—PAGE 35—133SC.—livE ArT r16174 that the viewer can never tell if he’s being supportive or subversive. Morgan’s collages of fact and fiction, bEAgLE OR sOmETHINg with their dramatic nuances and subtle reversals, lend surprising tension to oth- The composer’s name was Beagle or something, erwise familiar events; all of his stories one of those Brits who make the world wistful play like thrillers. Part of the illusion of with chorales and canticles and this piece, plausibility comes from a shrewd selec- a tone poem or what-have-you, tion of detail: Nixon’s appreciation of chimes and strings aswirl, dangerous for one Frost’s Italian-leather loafers sheds light whose eyelids and sockets have been rashing from tears.