Frost/Nixon

At the time of the actual Frost/Nixon interviews I was even less interested in White House politics than I am now, although the incumbent is easily good for a laugh or a sob. As a result, I confronted the Broadway production of Peter Morgan's Frost/Nixon (now in the final days of its run at the Jacobs Theatre) as I now do the published text, with both an advantage and a disadvantage.

The disadvantage is that I have to guess—rather uneducatedly—what in the play is fact, what fiction. The advantage is that it is all news to me, and that I can view the play with the freshest eyes, as I would a newly discovered private diary of the emperor Tiberius or an unpublished naughty novel by Napoleon Bonaparte.

Well, it is a highly enjoyable play to view and very nearly as enjoyable to read. Of course, we miss the clever multiple-screen video of the proceedings, permitting intimate close-ups of the principals. Also the fascinating stage business, cannily devised by Morgan and compellingly directed by Michael Grandage. And, above all, the superb performances of Frank Langella as Nixon and Michael Sheen as Frost.

On the other hand, there are compensations. We can savor Morgan's imagination, stagecraft and wit at leisure. Take this about Frost from Jim Reston, who is the compere of the staged proceedings: "The most unlikely white knight. A man with no political convictions...who had never voted in his life. But someone who had one big advantage over all of us. He understood television."

[IMG:R]And how well Morgan understands building a joke. When Frost on a transatlantic flight is trying to pick up Caroline Cushing, a comely neighbor across the aisle, he questions her about not drinking her complimentary champagne. "Not on aeroplanes," she replies. Frost allows how "it dehydrates one terribly" and recommends washing it down with water, "the way the Viennese serve coffee." "I've never been to Vienna," Caroline remarks, setting up the payoff: "You'd like it. It's like Paris without the French."

Or take the delightful running gag about Frost's elegantly Italian non-laceup shoes, which Nixon envies as something he's never seen before. But weren't there plenty of loafers around already? Perhaps not in Nixon's circles. At any rate, those shoes elicit both laughs and, near the end, a touching sigh of sympathy. Historic? Hardly.

As Morgan says in a prefatory note, he considers the play "an accurate representation of what actually happened," but admits to having been "on occasion, perhaps inevitably, unable to resist using my imagination." So we get half and half: a docudrama, at times favoring the faithful docu, at others, the fanciful drama.

Why not—as long as your invention is not inferior to history, which Morgan's happily isn't. One recalls how well he imagined so much about Queen Elizabeth II and Tony Blair in that fascinating movie The Queen, and how he did not shy away from such obvious flights of fancy as the business with the stag. Similarly in the Frost/Nixon fantasia about a drunken nocturnal phone call from Nixon to Frost, wherein Morgan allows his imagination some dazzling acrobatics that anyone can recognize as invented. But as Anatole France, the great but neglected French writer, observed in a like context: "Here is a story truer than the truth."

So too now: Morgan's drama is as good as his docu. Long may it thrive.