The 1968 debates between Gore Vidal and Willam F Buckley have already been litigated in print and documented on film. What can be learned from bringing Best of Enemies to the stage?
It’s said that politics makes for strange bedfellows. Best of Enemies, currently showing at the Young Vic, proves that it can make for even stranger adaptations: this is the play of the documentary of the televised debate series.
Best of Enemies, written by James Graham and directed by Jeremy Herrin, is inspired by the 2015 documentary of the same name co-directed by Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville.
The subject is the series of 10 incendiary televised debates between public intellectuals William F Buckley Jr and Gore Vidal. Those encounters, moderated by Howard K Smith, were staged as part of ABC News coverage of the 1968 Republican and Democratic National Conventions, respectively held in Miami Beach and Chicago.
While not everyone agrees with the treatise running through Gordan and Neville’s documentary, it’s broadly successful in acquainting non-wonks with Buckley and Vidal, the wider social context of 1968, and the way in which the debates escalated toward a landmark moment in television history.
Graham’s theatrical adaptation likewise dramatises the events of 1968 while retaining the documentarian impulse to comment and contextualise for a modern audience. But what is brought to the stage that hasn’t already been brought to the screen?
Foreshadowing an unhappy future
Perhaps to use Vidal’s own phrasing about the attraction of theatrical performance, the idea is to see “the story experienced not reported.” In doing so, the audience might gain a stronger feel for the origins of political polarisation in the USA and beyond.
To quote Vidal: this is “the story experienced not reported”
In fact, Aretha Franklin (Justina Kehinde) appears at the play’s inception to inform the audience that the staged events are a “turning point” and they are about to experience “a foreshadowing of an unhappy future that y’all livin’ in today.”
In the late 1960s, incorporating such debates into live convention coverage was a comparatively novel undertaking. Today the Buckley-Vidal clashes are widely recognised as ushering in the ‘red vs blue’ age of modern political punditry – soundbites, zingers, memorable statistics, crosstalk and righteous indignation.
Yet that cultural legacy is largely overshadowed in the popular consciousness by the events of the penultimate debate. In front of an audience of several millions, Vidal nonchalantly suggested that Buckley was a “crypto-nazi.” His remark visibly enraged his opponent, who called Vidal a “queer” and threatened to punch him in the face.
In the context of the debates, and in both iterations of Best Of Enemies, it’s centred as the “you can’t handle the truth” moment: the dramatic outburst during which a man’s public mask slips under heated cross-examination, with disastrous results.
As Vidal himself remembered in Esquire: “the little door in William F. Buckley Jr.’s forehead suddenly opened and out sprang that wild cuckoo which I had always known was there but had wanted so much for others, preferably millions of others, to get a good look at.”
Demonic, infantilising little lens
This moment is masterfully handled in the context of the new theatrical production, in which David Harewood and Charles Edwards play Buckley and Vidal respectively, supported by a group of players who all take on multiple alternating roles as major figures of the era, including Robert F Kennedy, Andy Warhol and James Baldwin.
The staging underscores that this is a performance within a performance: a large elevated TV production TV control room dominates the rear of the stage, its interior visible behind three large gauze screens. Whenever one of the debates takes place on the stage below, live feeds are projected onto the screens from two cameras trained upon the actors.
Seeing the actors on camera grounds their performances in the context of the debates
Seeing Harewood and Edwards in close-up on these screens grounds their performances within the claustrophobic context of the debates – it emphasises the power of what Vidal refers to as the “demonic, infantilising little lens”.
Another deft choice is to use those same screens to show archival footage of various speeches from the era, with which members of the cast then synchronise their performance.
In the most striking instance, James Baldwin (Syrus Lowe) recalls his 1965 Cambridge Union debate with Buckley, falling into a momentary reverie and reproducing his righteous “I picked the cotton” oration, before seamlessly switching gears into comic understatement.
Vidal and Buckley, dialled down
From the doubling of prominent roles, the direct addresses to the audience, and the playful blend of live and archival footage, it’s clear that the play is more concerned with exploring ideas than reaching for verisimilitude. This metatheatricality is also present in the performances of Harewood and Edwards.
Neither Vidal nor Buckley commanded much popular affection – at best, depending on your political stripes, they inspired respect rather than devotion. This production makes both figures a little easier to tolerate across two hours of rhetorical sparring and intellectual preening. Buckley’s patrician languor is dialled down a few notches, as is Vidal’s martian detachment.
Buckley seethes at Vidal’s refusal to adhere to the Queensbury Rules of political debate
Harewood even manages to solicit some sympathy for Buckley, rendering him as a pathologically proud man, longing for establishment validation, seething at Vidal’s refusal to adhere to the Queensbury Rules of political discourse.
The point is to dramatise events rather than to reconstruct them, but in giving us a view into the private lives of both men, there are moments when these stylistic choices run up against the record. In one mocking observation, Buckley is labelled ‘effete’ – which he surely appeared at times – yet it doesn’t quite ring true, thanks to the vulnerability Harewood brings to the role, particularly in his ‘offscreen’ moments.
More light than heat
Still, when the big moment comes and the ad hominem attacks fly, the players nail it – Buckley’s epithet solicited shocked gasps from some audience members, a few of whom must not have known what was coming.
Vidal and Buckley’s infamous exchange was followed by a memorable understatement from the moderator, Howard K Smith, who observed that their discussion had generated “a little more heat and a little less light than usual”. At its best, Best of Enemies generates some additional light by reimagining encounters between the major figures of the era.
In one instance, Bobby Kennedy (Tom Godwin) finishes his victory speech at the Embassy Ballroom and drifts off stage like a wraith. Standing in his dressing gown, Vidal watches an avatar of liberal hope – and a nemesis – vanishing into history. Neither man will achieve his dream of becoming President.
In another intimate moment before the penultimate debate, Baldwin offers a last-minute pep talk to Vidal, and emphasises the stakes of the confrontation. Baldwin quietly notes that Vidal and Buckley are alike in enjoying a level of privileged detachment from the economic and social exigencies they’re being paid to debate.
Hearing the cuckoo
Unfortunately, the playwright can’t quite resist putting a bow on things, rather than resting in the dead air of Buckley and Vidal’s final, forgotten encounter.
Instead, journalist Brooke Gladstone (Kehinde) comes on to awkwardly contextualise the debates both for the participants and for the 21st century audience. Then she leaves Vidal and Buckley to have a ‘real’ discussion with the cameras off, sipping bourbon and cautiously coming out of their shells.
Of course, they are still being watched by us, and this minor rapprochement stretches credulity.
Vidal and Buckley’s encounter was relitigated (and then actually litigated) via epic rejoinders published in Esquire. Each man apparently loathed the other, and his politics, until the end. It doesn’t seem credible that there exists a dramatic universe in which these two weird and self-absorbed intellectuals would break bread.
In print, Buckley made a grudging apology for his slur. In his rebuttal, Vidal observed, “All in all, I was pleased with what had happened: I had enticed the cuckoo to sing its song, and the melody lingers on.”
It certainly lingers on in Graham’s drama; yet, even with the profanities left in, this cover version aims for considerably more mass-market appeal than the original.
