The master chronicler of British politics of the late 20th / early 21st centuries turns his attention to the US in 1968, a year that may have heralded the beginning of the polarisation we’ve been living through for the last five years or so, inspired by the documentary by Morgan Neville & Robert Gordon. An extraordinarily eventful year in which the Vietnam War continued to divide the nation and the world, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated, student riots across the globe, civil rights protests the US, the Democratic Convention beleaguered by protest and division and Nixon was elected President, to replace LBJ.
The focus of James Graham’s new play is the adversarial ABC TV debates between William F Buckley Jr and Gore Vidal, which took place prior to and during the 1968 Democratic Convention, but the play is populated with other real life characters from the period, including writer James Baldwin, singers Aretha Franklin, Petula Clark and Harry Belafonte and artist Andy Warhol, with Enoch Powell and Tariq Ali representing the UK! Graham says the debates are verbatim, but everything else is speculation. It’s an extraordinary sweep of events which feels more like a decade than a year, that comes over as historically significant.
Jeremy Herrin marshals his outstanding cast of just ten, some playing up to seven characters, to make this all very real, from TV studios to protests to rallies to more intimate scenes in hotel bedrooms. David Harewood and Charles Edwards are terrific as Buckley and Vidal, sparring on camera and off. John Hodgkinson’s three roles include the contrasting somewhat calm TV interviewer Howard K Smith and the bombastic larger-than-life Mayor Daley of Chicago, both brilliantly done. Tom Godwin manages to characterise people as diverse as Andy Warhol, Bobby Kennedy and Enoch Powell to great success. Similarly, Surus Lowe brings James Baldwin, Harry Belafonte and Martin Luther King to life.
I didn’t engage with the play as much as I have with Graham’s British material, and I did feel it needed tightening up occasionally, but it’s great new writing given a thrilling production and I left the theatre replete, still thinking about these historical events and their contemporary relevance. Another great night at the Young Vic.
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