Reviews 2008
Reviews 2008
✭✭✭✩✩
by Peter Morgan, directed by Ted Dykstra
Canadian Stage Company, Bluma Appel Theatre, Toronto
October 16-November 8, 2008
The Canadian Stage Company’s production of “Frost/Nixon”, a co-pro with Playhouse Theatre Company of Vancouver, makes it very difficult to see what it was that excited so many critics in London and New York to rain superlatives on the play. The play by Peter Morgan, who wrote the screenplays for the films “the Queen” (2006) and “The Last King of Scotland” (2006), is determinedly middlebrow and the play’s actual effect seems to contradict the author’s intentions. Near the end of the play Morgan’s Nixon tells interviewer David Frost that he was “a worthy opponent”, but, in fact, the action, at least as it is portrayed under Ted Dykstra’s direction, does not support this view at all. Nixon comes off as the only complex figure in the play while Frost seems a vapid lightweight.
Morgan’s subject is, of course, the famous series of interviews that David Frost held with the recently resigned President Nixon in 1977. For anyone who actually saw those interviews there really is no reason to see the play. And the actual interviews that were available on video will be released on DVD on December 2, 2008. Morgan’s audience would seem to be people curious to see to how famous people are portrayed on stage or people nostalgic for the 1970s when Nixon’s crimes now seem petty compared with the abuses of power under the current Bush administration. Nixon was at least a statesman who had gone wrong while Bush is merely a politician.
The entire set-up of the action is meant to suggest a collision of equals. Scenes of Frost and his faltering career alternate with scenes of Nixon and his resignation and retirement. The series of interviews are compared to a boxing match in four rounds with Nixon consulting with his coach Jack Brennan and Frost consulting with his team of Jim Reston, John Birt and Bob Zelnick. To reinforce the notion of an equal match Morgan invents a phone call from a drunken Nixon to a sleepy Frost in which Nixon says how they both are the same, underdogs all their lives and still struggling to garner the acclaim that will restore a sense of self-worth.
Undercutting this set-up is the fact that Nixon and Frost are demonstrably not equals. Nixon is a former statesman and Frost is a mere performer. Nixon does not need his “coach” to do battle with Frost, whereas Morgan shows that Frost does need his team of three even to keep up with Nixon. In the end it is a piece of unpublished information that Reston digs up that gives Frost his one advantage over Nixon. But even then Morgan makes it clear that Frost does not “defeat” Nixon. Rather, Nixon uses Frost’s interview publicly to fall on his sword. Morgan’s attempts to build up suspense about whether Frost will or will not get the interview, will or will not get the financing, will or will not learn the right strategy, thus all goes for naught and, in any case, is not particularly interesting.
The acting of the principals only heightens the flaws in the play. As Nixon, Len Cariou gives a wonderfully natural, assured performance of a complex figure, a man coming to terms with the fact that all his many diplomatic breakthroughs will be overshadowed in history by his participation in a single demeaning crime. Cariou makes you empathize with Nixon in a way you never thought possible by revealing the broken man behind the public pose of strength. As Frost, David Storch gives an incredibly mannered performance as if he were modelling himself on the character of Mr. Humphries in “Are You Being Served?” How either Dykstra or Storch thought that making camp airhead would be an accurate representation of David Frost is a mystery. It means that we are hardly rooting for Frost and could care less whether these interviews make or break his career.
Ari Cohen has a resonant voice as Jim Reston the “Liberal” narrator while Tom McBeath roughens his voice to seem tough as the “Conservative” narrator Jack Brennan, Nixon’s ex-military head of staff. If Morgan were trying to write a complex play, he could use the two narrators to present conflicting accounts of the events so that we would have to sort out the truth. As it is, the two present a unified narrative with an annoying commentary about what it all means.
Other roles have little dramatic bite. Damien Atkins’ John Birt is nervous with a British accent while Michael Healey’s Bob Zelnick is nervous with an American accent. Alec Willows cameo as deal-maker Swifty Lazar is small but has more impact. Andrea Runge has the utterly thankless role as Caroline Cushing, millionaire socialite and Frost’s squeeze of the week.
Patrick Clark’s set consisting of a series of moveable beige panels easily suggests the locations of anonymous hotel rooms and studios where most of the action takes place. More interesting is Jamie Nesbitt’s video design that recreates the blinking multicoloured squares that used to serve as transitions on the stages of television variety shows in the 1960s and ‘70s. Sometimes Nesbitt will break up the background into a what looks like a collage of separate photographs à la David Hockney. Older television interviews by Frost or Mike Wallace (David Bloom) are projected onto a screen above the stage made to look like a large old-fashioned television. It is odd, however, that Dykstra has Nesbitt use live video projections only for the conclusion of Frost’s final interview. The point is to give us a close-up of Nixon’s tear-stained face, but it is also distracting to force us to look away from Cariou at the most emotional moment in the play.
David Frost once said, “The aim of everything I do is to leave the audience a little more alert, a little more aware, a little more alive.” With the major exception of Cariou’s performance, the same cannot be said for this production of “Frost/Nixon”.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Len Cariou as Richard M. Nixon. ©David Cooper.
2008-10-22
Frost/Nixon