FROST/NIXON: Tricky Smoothness

IN his play Frost/Nixon Peter Morgan gives new meaning to the term political theatre. It is a dramatization -- from the inside -- of David Frost's famous 1977 interviews with Richard Nixon. It is a show that improves as it develops. Although the play's performed without intermission, watching it I definitely sensed it was two halves seeking to form a cohesive dramatic whole. But its first half is not as strong as its second. When we meet Frost, he's British TV personality hopping from the UK to Australia and finally to America, his shallow glamor intact. Nixon, on the other hand, has just resigned from the presidency, giving his bizarre-yet-broken man final salute on the White House South Lawn. The first act centers around Frost's attempts to stay relevant in the cutthroat worlds of television and celebrity. This contrasts with Nixon's effort to just keep merely living. Frost feels interviewing the disgraced former president would be his ticket back to success. When Nixon learns he's to be paid for the interviews, he says yes. In one fell swoop, Frost goes from interviewing the Bee Gees to taking on another rock icon -- but one that is of dourness and dark suits. Yet both could credibly sing "Staying Alive." The play's staging is definitely alive, dominated by the use of television screens perched above the stage. At first, they detract from rather than add to, the drama. They feel very sitcomish. But as the drama deepens, and Frost forces Nixon to confront Watergate, we see Nixon in close-up. We see the pain and shame. I don't think a fellow American could get Richard Milhous Nixon to say what he said in those interviews. And yet it happened, despite the clash of Frost's arrogance and Nixon's swarthy reticence. Michael Sheen captures Frost very well. You can almost see his petrified state just beneath his plastic smile. Here Sheen adds to his effective essaying of real people (he portrayed to great effect Tony Blair in the Morgan-scriped The Queen). Frank Langella is a tour-de-force as Nixon. He's got the 38th president's voice, stoop and awkwardess down pat. He also gives us Nixon's vulnerability and sense of sorrow -- something dark that really hasn't seen the light of day before. Although it starts out unfocused and poorly, Frost/Nixon is bolstered by Scotty Reston, a famous New York Times reporter who serves as a greek Chrous throughout the play. And it ends strongly, all the while reminding us that politics, to paraphrase the sage, is just theatre by other means. And that the best special effects are the human ones.