Review: In ‘Best of Enemies,’ a TV Duel Becomes a Theater Gem

LONDON — History comes hurtling to life in “Best of Enemies,” the latest attempt from the prolific playwright James Graham (“Ink,” “Quiz”) to put flesh on the bare bones of the past. Chronicling a sequence of televised face-offs that transfixed the United States in 1968, Graham once again shows a gift for mining the annals of politics and journalism for real theatrical gems. The result, at the Young Vic through Jan. 22, is the most riveting play in London just now.

It helps that the personalities involved in those 10 TV debates were William F. Buckley Jr. and Gore Vidal, two richly articulate men of any dramatist’s dreams. On the one side was Buckley (played here by David Harewood), founder of The National Review and a conservative grandee; on the other was Vidal (Charles Edwards), the pleasure-seeking novelist and playwright with two homes in Italy and a withering disregard for the “Christian values” Buckley espoused.

Ideological opposites, the pair were brought together by ABC to restore the flagging ratings of a network dryly referred to early in the play as the “almost broadcasting company.” Drawing inspiration from a 2015 film documentary of the same name, Graham sets their increasingly barbed exchanges against the backdrop of a tumultuous summer. We’re reminded, via Luke Halls’s video design, of the riots and protests that were tearing at America, just as Buckley and Vidal tore into one another. (Bunny Christie’s set is a horseshoe-shaped soundstage with screens perched above the action.)

Graham’s narrative begins at the end, with his opponents clearly disturbed by a shift in their discussion from which there is no turning back. Vidal has denounced Buckley on air during the Democratic convention in Chicago as “a crypto-Nazi,” and Buckley has retaliated by dismissing Vidal as “queer.” The play then rewinds and charts the course back to that on-air debacle, but we also seem to be witnessing a descent into ad hominem argument that has only gathered in intensity to this day.

Graham’s obvious theatrical prototype is “Frost/Nixon,” Peter Morgan’s 2006 play, which Ron Howard later made into a film. But the stakes here seem higher and the context broader: Jeremy Herrin’s deft production brings in cameos by Aretha Franklin (Justina Kehinde) — “they know who I am,” she snaps when she is introduced — and Andy Warhol (Tom Godwin). The actor John Hodgkinson, doubling parts, plays Chicago’s bellicose mayor, Richard Daley, and the ABC News anchor Howard K. Smith, both of whom he does well.

James Baldwin (Syrus Lowe, excellent), another onetime debating opponent of Buckley’s, is seen now and again, commenting on the personalities and the fallout between them: “Whatever the hate, wherever it comes from, it will always eventually destroy the one hating,” he tells us.

Graham sufficiently connects the vitriol between Buckley and Vidal with the contempt, and worse, that dominates the airwaves now, but you slightly recoil when someone belabors a point. “More and more, we’re divided into our own communities of concern,” a media analyst (Kehinde again) remarks near the end, bemoaning the way in which TV has increasingly carved up American life.

Even then, the feral energy between the two leads proves irresistible. Vidal is a plum role, and the wonderful Edwards is suitably dapper and silver-tongued, not least when on the offensive: “Do you read?” he asks Buckley. “You could learn a great deal.” We clock Vidal’s predatory eye — “speaking of eating, hello” he remarks libidinously to a young man (Sam Otto) who will become his aide and bedmate — alongside his exhaustive breadth of historical knowledge.

Buckley, far from being the straw man of the pair, is arguably the more complicated. Casually disdainful and airily patronizing, he is given tremendous gravitas by Harewood, a Black British actor cunningly cast against expectation as a white establishment figure who was taken to task for bigotry more than once.

Speaking in a lower register than Buckley, Harewood requires that we listen afresh to Buckley, as we do to Vidal: both men at ease with their characters’ fast-talking fluency of thought. And if their shared fate was to cross the line that separates reasonable debate from rancor, well, welcome to the world today, and to the coarsening of the public arena that “Best of Enemies” brings stingingly to life.

Best of Enemies
Through Jan. 22, 2022 at the Young Vic in London; youngvic.org.