Best of Enemies

Youngest sister generously having bought tickets for mrs maytrees, herself and myself to see Best of Enemies, written by James Graham and directed by Jeremy Herrin, we went to the Noel Coward Theatre in London to see the play.

A really enjoyable production in a theatre which was full for the matinee production; there was not a single spare seat that I could discern.

Time Out reports:

...A drama about the bitter rivalry between US political commentators Gore Vidal and William F Buckley Jr during the 1968 US party conference season, in which they served as pundits for the struggling ABC News.

Though Vidal in particular is famous to this day, there is naturally the temptation to respond to the premise with a hearty shrug. But Graham is the man who made his reputation with ‘This House’, a drama about the machinations of the Labour whips’ office during the hung parliament of the 1970s. Of course he aces it.

The first section of ‘Best of Enemies’ consists of extremely smart exposition: we’re introduced to the fact it’s the ‘60s via cheeky quips from decade leading lights James Baldwin and Aretha Franklin, then plunged into a quickfire account of ABC’s struggles to compete for viewers against their bigger, better-resourced rivals NBC and CBS. But despite funny scenes – notably one in which a savant-like Andy Warhol annoys everybody at a house party – we’re never allowed to forget this isn’t the cuddly British ’60s: it’s the screaming American ’60s, a deeply divided country locked in an unpopular foreign war, with powderkeg domestic politics, still reeling from the assassination of JFK, the wounds of segregation still gaping wide open.

It’s skillfully set up, but it’s when the debates start that the play goes from ‘good’ to ’electrifying’. The two lead actors are phenomenal. Harewood, in his first stage outing in a decade, presents Buckley as a relatively decent, certainly sincere conservative who goes from dismissing the debates as a sideshow to getting dangerously high on the celebrity status they afford him – he goes from starchy ideologue to self-styled figurehead of the resurgent right. He’s a complicated figure, his innate decency balanced by a libertarian meanness and an un-self-critical belief in his own righteousness. 

Harewood plays him brilliantly, at first a stiff, impassive man whose emotions are only betrayed by a twitchy half-smile and the frank conversations he has with his beloved wife Patricia (Clare Foster); but later he thaws into a cocky, confident media performer who is only undone when national events overtake him, and his underlying fury at Vidal gets the better of him. 

Harewood is, of course, Black, where Buckley was white – he’s obviously mostly cast in the role because this is 2021 and he’s really terrific, but I think the casting helps the production insofar as it somewhat deflects from the fact Graham absolutely loves to write plays about middle-aged white guys

The play held one's attention from start to finish. Gore Vidal, was eventually in a fit of anger by William F. Buckley JR, brilliantly played by David Harewood, outed as an homosexual which in those days  was not  publicly acceptable.