Frost/NixonBy Peter Morgan. Directed by Ted Dykstra. Featuring Len Cariou, David Storch. Presented by Canadian Stage Company. Previews Oct 13-15. Runs Oct 16 to Nov 8. Mon-Sat 8pm; Wed 1:30pm; Sat 2pm. $20 (Mon PWYC). Bluma Appel Theatre, 27 Front E. 416-368-3110.
www.canstage.com.
Frost/Nixon, writer Peter Morgan’s acclaimed play about the historic 1977 television interview in which British talk-show host David Frost nailed a beleaguered, post-Watergate Richard Nixon to the wall, is packed with pugnacity. Even its name suggests a title match.
“[Morgan] has gone so far as to say that he was trying to make this into a sort of intellectual Rocky,” says actor David Storch, who plays Frost opposite Len Cariou’s Nixon in a new CanStage mounting, the first to hit Toronto since the work’s successes in London’s West End and on Broadway. (A film version, starring Frank Langella and Michael Sheen and directed by Ron Howard, will be released in December.) “There are moments that get a fairly good audience reaction, like when Brennan [i.e., Nixon’s former military aide] says, ‘Continue exactly the same way. Long answers. Control the space. Don’t let him in.’ It’s enjoyable to see something that might be dry as a political interview turned into something so accessible, energetic and fun.”
This is due in no small part, Storch notes, to Morgan’s shaping — but is not to say that the original interview isn’t without its histrionic climaxes (which, in turn, become the playwright’s own), such as the now-legendary moment in which Frost corners Nixon about portions of transcripted tape proving he knew of an E. Howard Hunt cover-up months before he had said he did. Still, Morgan puts his own spin on things. He explores the preceding wheeling and dealing (involving, among other eccentric figures, Hollywoodian Irving “Swifty” Lazar, Nixon’s agent at the time) and includes commentators: not just Brennan but Jim Reston, a journalist and then-researcher for Frost, whose first-person narrative provides the work’s essential, elucidating blow-by-blow. For Morgan, notes Storch, it’s all about “what these guys had to gain and what they had to lose.”
“Frost’s position had gone from top-of-the-heap to dwindled celebrity and power,” he says. “Nixon wanted very much to rehabilitate his own reputation and to re-establish himself as a legitimate political figure and advisor to the current government. Frost, in the sense of this story, wins, is catapulted back into the limelight, and Nixon is condemned eternally.”
For the purposes of Morgan’s battle, then, Storch must play Frost — who, as a celebrity interviewer and sometime-political journalist, had done a lot of serious, admirable work before the Nixon interview — at his most dandyish. (In 2006 The Guardian described Morgan’s Frost as “vain, oleaginous and occasionally downright creepy,” epithets that could also apply to Timmy Williams, Monty Python’s caricature of Frost.) “It serves the heavyweight championship concept best if Frost is someone whose weaknesses — his life as a jet-setting playboy, as a gadfly — are exaggerated,” asserts Storch. “It should seem inconceivable that this political lightweight could ever bring down someone as accomplished at lying and filibustering as Nixon.”
As far as that man goes, Storch points to the richness of Morgan’s examination, which is cutting but also respectfully ambiguous. “Young people might see Nixon as just another Bush, but those old enough to remember will recognize in Morgan’s portrayal a man who did wrong, but who had enormous capabilities as a statesman and diplomat,” says Storch. “You can’t dismiss that. It makes it more complicated for us to judge him, and more interesting for us to watch him in action.”