Young Vic | ★★★★★

Political playwrights tend to have an axe to grind. Not James Graham who approaches his subjects with an eye that is as refreshing as it is forensic. In his play Ink he could have so easily turned his subject Rupert Murdoch into the most unsympathetic of characters. But instead he saw an outsider breaking into the closed shop of newspaper tycoons.
In Labour of Love (2017) he charts the history of the Labour party in a way that makes a reconciliation between the traditional and Blairite wings of the movement seem possible, even though by the time the play premiered with Tamsin Greig and Martin Freeman the rift had already turned into a chasm under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership.
This time Graham turns his attention to the bitter discourse, or abuse, between America’s progressive left and conservative right who Graham places centre stage. On the right is Republican thinker William F. Buckley and on the left is his Democrat counterpart Gore Vidal, played here respectively by the immensely watchable David Harewood and Charles Edwards.
Inspired by Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon’s documentary, Graham has constructed his play around the series of groundbreaking TV debates in 1968 between the two political heavyweights.
Held as the Republican and the Democrat parties are having their conventions, the debates are the great hope for the ABC network who are desperate to catch up with their rivals who have far greater audience share in their political coverage. It is against this background that Buckley and Vidal are persuaded to form a double act of political debate and discuss their differences on live TV.
Although the two were already known to each other as political adversaries and were separated by dislike as a well as disagreement, neither was used to their intellect being subject to the other’s serene disdain.
Arguments over capitalism and social justice become more pugilistic. By the time the TV show moves to a lock-downed Chicago riven with political protest against the Vietnam war and where the Democrats have gathered in the fly-infested meat-packing district, Vidal and Buckley are engaged in an attritional battle. Graham superbly sets up this story by starting at its climax. Or at least its immediate aftermath. Buckley has just said something on air that is so terrible for live television he and Vidal are frozen in horror.
The rest of the play is told in flash back and charts how this moment of undiluted rage came about on live TV.
Though Buckley’s comment is on public record it would be a spoiler to report it here. The tension of Jeremy Herrin’s production lies in waiting to find out what was said.
Bunnie Christies’s terrific design sets the action in a space that is the shape of a cock-fighting ring overlooked by a gallery from which TV executives monitor the action and whose windows double as screens on which news footage is projected. It shows Democrat delegates Paul Newman and Arthur Miller are seen shocked by the security operation suppressing protestors. Back in the studio the calculated contempt of Edwards’s Vidal goads the patrician authority of Harewood’s Buckley into a rash response and suddenly we are back at the moment where the play began.
It’s an ingeniously constructed piece of theatre. And Graham once again produces a thrilling drama that simultaneously argues for debate that is civilised. This is the antidote to Twitter anger and the play should be seen everywhere, especially the United States.