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,” —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 ’s pivotal the power-sharing agreement made be- meeting with , 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- 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 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 ) 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

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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. on his capacity for envy; the bagpipes The music occupied the car where that wake the Queen each morning an- I had parked and then sat, staring at nounce both the day and the ritual that a tree, a smallish maple, defines her life and which she defines fire-gold and half-undone by the wind, (“It’s her morning alarm call, and it’s the shaking in itself, way she wakes up wherever she is—any- shocking blue morning sky behind, and also where in the world,” the stage directions the trucks and telephone wires and dogs read). Frears said, “One thing people and children late to school along Orange Street, but would say about the Blair-Brown film it was the tree that caused an uproar, was ‘Well, after a few minutes I stopped it was the tree that shook and shed, thinking they were actors.’ People would aureate as a shaken soul, I remembered describe that quite early suspension of I was supposed to have one—for convenience disbelief. His writing leads you to accu- racy.” He added, “It was the freshest I placed it in my chest, the heart being away, piece of writing I’d come across—not and now it seems the soul has lodged there, shaking, like anything else. It’s so pertinent.” The golden-orange, half-spent but clanging success of Morgan’s narrative style can be truer than Beagle music or my forehead pressed measured by the number of imitators he hard on the steering wheel in petition for release. has spawned; within the past few months, British film companies and television —April Bernard channels have announced projects deal- ing with , the young Queen Victoria, and Buckingham Pal- ent,” he told the London Evening Stan- never returned. The decision, according ace. “As much as I would like to carry on dard last year. “I don’t really know what to Morgan, was “completely the making writing like this, I fear I can’t,” Morgan the effect is, but I suppose people might of me.” In order to pay for a six-form col- said. call me an ambitious man, and I’d say lege—a crammer, in effect—which he that an ambitious man is a damaged needed to attend before university, he lthough Morgan likes to scrutinize man.” Certainly, even before his father’s worked nights doing data entry at a bank. the contradictory traits of his char- death, Morgan had been set on the edu- When it came time to choose a univer- acters,A he studiously refuses to examine cational ladder of British upper-middle- sity, although he had the exam results for his own nature. “I don’t want to know class success: he attended St. Paul’s Pre- Oxford or Cambridge, he decided on what swamp of toxicity and lunacy lies paratory School and, thanks to the Leeds University, where he turned out to beneath the surface,” he has said. As a re- munificence of a godparent, Downside, be, by and large, the only Southerner and sult, his metabolism is, according to Har- a Catholic boarding school in Somerset, the only public-school boy in his year. ries, “quite charged.” Behind the urban- which he hated and where he developed He was thrown in with politicized peo- ity and wit, Frears said, Morgan is “a very what he has called “the muscles of dis- ple who, he has said, “tore me to pieces.” emotional man,” with “tremendous ex- obedience.” He said, “I was taken out of For a naïve, sheltered middle-class kid, tremes of cheerfulness and depression.” a very Jewish meritocratic school—St. the experience was transformative. He added, “It can cause havoc.” Paul’s—and sent to this boarding school By the time he graduated, with a de- Morgan, who calls himself “a compli- where I came up against landed English- gree in fine arts, in 1984, Morgan had cated mongrel,” was born in England, ness for the first time in my life. It wasn’t discovered theatre and won some success the son of Arthur Morgenthau, a Ger- my people. I just didn’t get it.” After he’d as a student actor. After a bout of stage- man Jewish refugee, and Inga Bojcek, a been there for about three and a half fright in a production of “Love’s Labour’s Polish Catholic refugee (one had fled the years, Morgan recalls, he woke up one Lost,” however, he gave up any hope of a Nazis, the other the Russians). Morgan, day and thought, This is not a sentence. professional career on the stage. Instead, who was nicknamed Fritz at school, grew I don’t have to do this. He phoned his with Mark Wadlow, a university friend up speaking German at home. When he mother and told her he’d be home in and collaborator (who is now a senior was nine, his father died, at the age of three hours. Then, leaving all his belong- writer on the ITV series “Coronation fifty-nine. “It is devastating, losing a par- ings behind, he walked out of school and Street”), he channelled his theatrical en-

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TNY—2007_04_30—PAGE 36—133SC. ergy into directing shows and writing Queen” of deer-stalking on the Scottish to apologize—something he had never scripts. In the mid-eighties, Wadlow and moors. “I’ve never actually been deer- done. Nixon, from his isolation in San Morgan took a play, “Gross,” based on stalking,” Frears said. “I made him come Clemente, California, saw it as a chance Wadlow’s summer job at a call center, to up to Scotland and take me out onto the to reënter the public arena, as well as to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. They at- moors, with all the people, and I said, make a big paycheck. (He negotiated tracted the attention of a producer of cor- ‘Now explain to me what happens. a deal in which he would receive six porate training films, who provided a Where’s the deer? Where are the people? hundred thousand dollars and twenty back-door entrée into filmmaking. By How close are they?’ I got him to go per cent of the profits from the broad- the time he was twenty-three, he and through it in detail.” Frears continued, casts.) The Nixon-Frost exchanges Wadlow were doing rewrites on John “The grumbling that went on! ‘Why am I were the television version of Muham- Schlesinger’s “Madame Sousatzka,” being dragged up to Scotland?’ He drives mad Ali’s rope-a-dope against George about which Pauline Kael said, “It should you senseless with rage half the time.” Foreman: Nixon outpointed his oppo- be projected on the wall while you have a Nonetheless, when, recently, Morgan was nent, only to be somehow blindsided at polite lunch at the Russian Tea Room— asked by Sony to direct his own movie, he the last minute. Morgan’s interest in the the wall behind you.” Morgan told the replied, “As long as Steve Frears is around, story was not political. Morgan saw in London Observer, “We were incredibly why on earth would I want to direct?” Frost’s and Nixon’s conflicting person- cheap and totally exploited for six months Morgan not only owes his best films to alities the prospect of gladiatorial com- for about five grand. . . . Then five or six Frears; he also inadvertently owes him his bat—a fight in which there could be years of penury followed, where we were first play. According to Frears, Morgan only one winner. “If you watch the in- still writing . . . any kind of scripts. It’s didn’t want to rush the writing of “The terviews in context, Nixon is momen- like when you turn on the tap and rust Queen.” “Take as long as you like,” Frears tarily wounded, but he quickly gath- comes out. It takes a while until it’s clear. told him. Given carte blanche, Morgan ers himself—he gives nothing back,” You have to write the bad ideas out.” wrote perhaps too quickly. He was done a Morgan said. “Now we’re getting into In 1990, Morgan and Wadlow wrote week later. The day before he handed in the laws of dramatic art. There are in- “Dear Rosie,” an Academy Award-nom- the script, Frears agreed to direct the mu- ternal imperatives and logics to nar- inated eleven-minute film about a strug- sical “Mrs. Henderson Presents,” with rative. I could just as easily have writ- gling female novelist, whose agent, more Dame , which meant that ten the piece—and found substance to impressed by her weight-loss program “The Queen” would be postponed for support it—to substantiate the idea that than by her prose, turns her into a diva of more than a year. “Stephen pissed me off Frost didn’t get Nixon, that Nixon half diet books. As a metaphor for commer- so much by doing ‘Mrs. Henderson Pre- threw it, in order for these interviews cial compromise, it seemed to reflect the sents’ before ‘The Queen’ that I started to sell.” Instead, although the play as- frustrations that Morgan was experienc- writing ‘Frost/Nixon’ as a sort of act of tutely synthesizes the actual events, it is, ing. “Until five years ago, he wasn’t an skydiving. The only way I was ever going by Morgan’s own admission, “a bouquet A-list writer,” Harries said. “He was to be able to be civil to Stephen again was to Frost.” Morgan said, “When I met pitching a lot of ideas that weren’t intrin- if I used that moment to do something Frost, I didn’t connect with him. He sically him. He could pitch a good ro- that I would never have done otherwise,” didn’t understand what I was trying to mantic comedy. He’s much smarter than Morgan said. He’d had the idea for “Frost/ do. I thought, The less I see of this man that, and actually he’s not fundamentally Nixon” for a long time. “I just didn’t have the better, because I wanted to write a comedy writer.” The turning point was the confidence to write,” he him dispassionately and, to “The Deal.” “It was radically different,” said. Now, emboldened by his some degree, respectfully.” Harries said. “He’d found himself. He anger, “I opened the door to Before beginning to write, knew what he wanted to write, and, as the airplane and jumped out. I Morgan spent about three much as anything, he knew what he thought, Well, I just hope I’ve weeks in Washington re- didn’t want to write.” The person who, got a parachute.” searching the project. He according to Morgan, made the difference even hired a tutor on Ameri- to his career was Frears. “Stephen’s where organ’s preferred can politics. He interviewed I got my confidence,” he said. “He chose method is to write first all the secondary players in to do my work. There’s not a charitable andM research later, passing the drama—the sidemen bone in his body, so clearly it must have the first draft to people in the who prepared Frost to go been out of self-interest.” know with the question “Is this believ- into the ring. Although Morgan regrets Frears also got Morgan to focus his able?” “Frost/Nixon” required a rever- not having built up the characters of ideas and to polish his exchanges to a sal of procedure. In 1977, David Frost, Frost’s high-powered advisers John Birt bright specificity. (“I just ask questions,” in an act of entrepreneurial chutzpah and Bob Zelnick—lacunae in the play Frears said. “You tease it out that way.”) intended to bolster his flagging career which the film will rectify—he got Sometimes in production, however, as a celebrity-talk-show host, coaxed lucky with the third member of Frost’s things between the two men can get fiery. the disgraced former President into six team, the writer James Reston, Jr. “One “He’s a big baby,” Frears said. “He just has hours of interviews, to be aired in four has to bow to the god of dramatis,” to be dealt with all the time.” Frears cited segments. Frost wanted to get Nixon to Morgan said. “I needed one angry as an example the helicopter shot in “The admit his culpability in Watergate and American liberal and one indignant

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TNY—2007_04_30—PAGE 37—133SC.—livE SPoT ArT r16170A, PlS iNSPECT ANd rEPorT oN quAliTY! militaristic Republican.” In Reston, how can he not stare with a sort of David Frost is played by Michael whom Morgan wrote into the play as fury and envy and erotic fascination Sheen, who, in the past few years, seems the embodiment of the American pro- at a young, confident, blue-eyed, un- to have found nearly permanent em- test against Nixon, he found an ada- perspiring, womanizing guy?” Morgan ployment in Morgan’s œuvre. He was mant and eloquent liberal with an un- said. The Nixon he brings onstage is a a memorable Tony Blair in both “The published manuscript about the event in monument of self-loathing and self- Deal” and “The Queen”; as soon as he his personal files. (Reston’s “The Con- consciousness, a man whose practiced has finished his limited engagement in viction of Richard Nixon” is being pub- bonhomie only underscores his dis- “Frost/Nixon,” he will move on to por- lished to coincide with the play’s run in comfort in his own skin. (“Most smiles tray the soccer supremo Brian Clough New York.) Although Morgan refers to are infectious. Make you want to smile in the next Morgan-Frears collabo- Reston’s manuscript as “quite unread- back. Nixon’s has the opposite effect,” ration. Here his warmth, humor, and able,” he was able to spin much of its in- the stage direction reads on the play’s alertness play well against the aloof and cidental detail into dramatic gold. He first page.) “I could write about awk- lugubrious Nixon. Where Nixon can acknowledged its usefulness in his per- wardness—all that kind of stuff—be- never, even at his best moments, give off sonal inscription of the published play cause I feel it,” Morgan said. a whiff of ease, Sheen’s Frost exudes it; to Reston—“collaborator, fellow con- The sinew of Morgan’s dialogue and Sheen manages to suggest both Frost’s spirator, colleague, and friend . . . with- the vivid emotional arcs he builds for manic effervescence and his dandy’s de- out whom this would never, could never his characters are a gift to first-rate ac- sire to shine. An expert mimic—he has have come into being.” tors—, Forest Whitaker, also played the loud and lewd high-camp Jim Broadbent, Samantha Morton, to king of the British “Carry On” come- organ is an opinionated man name a few. Now can dies, Kenneth Williams—Sheen has who relishes tweaking received be added to that list. As Nixon, Lan- a great deal of fun with Frost’s speech opinion.M His dramas rambunctiously gella, reprising his London triumph, is mannerisms, especially his alliterative challenge the public to get beyond magnificent. In life, Langella is known flourishes. The play recounts Frost’s re- what he has called “the default position to be a passionate, imposing, voluble tort to the rivalrous Mike Wallace about of hating,” which is a refusal to think. character; onstage, his stooped, jowly, his upcoming interview with Nixon: (“Politically, he teeters between the ex- repressed but forceful Nixon is a pi- “I’m hoping it will be a cascade of can- treme right and the extreme left,” Frears quant piece of theatrical transformation. dor.” But straight talk, when it comes, says. “He’s very hard to nail down.”) From the moment Langella’s Nixon is an imagined drunken late-night call “Frost/Nixon” is an entertaining the- enters—the occasion is a TV broad- from Nixon before the taping of the leg- atrical example of his maverick light cast in the Oval Office, on August 8, endary Watergate segment. “That’s our touch. “The conviction and crucifixion 1974, that turns out to be Nixon’s res- tragedy isn’t it, Mr. Frost?” Nixon says. of Richard Nixon doesn’t interest me,” ignation speech to the nation—he is “No matter how high we get, they still Morgan said. What interests him, as he shrouded in solitude, a stranger to him- look down on us.” He has sussed the told the Evening Standard last year, is self. Langella has given Nixon’s speech same canker of ambition and revenge “to represent people who are hated, al- patterns as much inspired scrutiny as his in his British adversary, of whom it was though in the case of Nixon and Amin posture. Langella’s raspy low voice— once said that “he rose without a trace.” that hatred is entirely justified.” The a sound with no smile in it—catches He goes on: greatest traps are the ones we lay for Nixon’s grave, evasive music. The tone, no matter how many awards—or how ourselves; Morgan seems to have a tal- with its combination of authority and many column inches are written about you—or how high the elected office is for ent for winkling out self-destructive banality, echoes some kind of inter- me—it still isn’t enough, am I right? We still contradictions in the historical figures nal emptiness. (“Pleasant evening last feel like the little man? The loser they told us he portrays. The Queen is master of night?” Nixon asks Frost, as they’re we were? A hundred times. The smart-asses at college. The high-ups. The well-born. The her public role and inept at her private about to tape the segment on Vietnam. people whose respect we really wanted. re- one; Gordon Brown is a remarkable “Did you do any fornicating?”) None- ally craved. And isn’t that why we work so public servant who can’t relate well to theless, Nixon’s hollow idiom can be hard now? Why we fight for every inch? the public; and, perhaps most tragic of hypnotic, distracting even Nixon him- all, Nixon is intelligent enough to ac- self from the implications of what he’s If Nixon intuits the bond of compe- knowledge his limitations but not smart saying. For instance, during his legal- tition between them, Frost senses in enough to do anything about them. istic wittering about Watergate, Frost Nixon the moral exhaustion of a life The historical event of the interviews, interrupts, “Are you really saying that dedicated to winning at all cost. When as Morgan sees it, brings together “two there are certain situations where the Nixon’s aide, against all the rules of en- lonely, disconnected men clamoring President can decide whether it’s in the gagement, interrupts the interview just for the limelight to complete them- best interest of the nation and do some- at the point where Nixon is about to selves somehow”; the encounter raises thing illegal?” Nixon answers, “I’m say- admit culpability—a moment of terrific powerful psychological undercur- ing that when the President does it that suspense, which is historically accu- rents. “Clumsy, socially inadequate means it’s not illegal.” The line, for ob- rate—Frost is curiously unruffled. As as Richard Nixon is, prone to uncon- vious sorry reasons in the republic, gets Morgan would have it, Nixon’s confes- trollable, incontinent perspiration, a huge laugh. sion of guilt is a sort of political suicide,

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TNY—2007_04_30—PAGE 38—133SC. a redemptive gesture, and Nixon has of its illusion of intimacy. The monu- shot for Frost’s show, which, accord- chosen Frost to assist him. “He wants mentality of the space—the mahogany- ing to the play, “attracted the largest me to do this. To finish him off,” Frost stained-pine surround, the thirty-six audience for a news program in the says before the interview resumes, and TV screens on the upstage wall, on history of American television”—Res- he does just that. “He wants the wilder- which the “televised” debates and the lo- ton (Stephen Kunken) is bemused by ness.” The fact that this powerful mo- cales can be seen—swallows up the ac- the spectacle of his elated cohort John ment is imagined doesn’t distract from tors, who are forced to do a lot of spin- Birt, who has stripped and run into its emotional truth. In lifting Nixon out ning and pacing and crossing, to provide the sea to celebrate. “That was before I of the odium in which history has pre- a bogus dynamism that is underlined by understood the reductive power of the served him, Morgan makes us feel Nix- the smash cuts of jarring sound. The closeup,” Reston says. He goes on, “The on’s tortured humanity—an intimation effect maximizes the limitations of the first and greatest sin of television is of genuine tragedy. play’s theatrical shorthand rather than that it simplifies. Diminishes. Great, The production has not travelled its drama. complex ideas, tranches of time, whole smoothly from the intimate Donmar Although the play allows Nixon a careers, become reduced to a single Warehouse, where was contrition and Frost a victory that don’t snapshot.” Television is by its nature a never more than thirty feet from the in- appear in the six hours of interviews, fictionalization of history; it personifies tellectual jousting, to the cavernous Morgan, by dramatizing the making history as fable agreed upon. Morgan, Broadway proscenium of the Jacobs; of the interviews, traps a fascinating the storyteller who plays his own game something essential in its chemistry has larger point about the media and de- of three-card monte with the actual, ap- changed. The dialogue is still tren- mocracy. He demonstrates that every- preciates the irony. “Frost has now re- chant, the main performances are still thing that rises in America converges packaged the whole thing,” Morgan vivacious and crowd-pleasing, but, in on television, where it is necessarily the- told me. “He’s reduced the interviews Michael Grandage’s transfer, “Frost/ atricalized and trivialized. In the play’s to the Watergate interview—cut out all Nixon” has become bombastic. The coda, after Nixon’s ravaged face has the others.” He added, “It’s now just the characters broadcast themselves across been maneuvered by Frost into a sort reëdited Watergate interview, which the , which robs the evening of onscreen confession—the money makes it look like he gets him.” 

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