It was a battle royale fought between American political titans, and it played out on screen in a series of televised bouts in 1968. Now James Graham, the leading British playwright behind the television drama Quiz and stage play Ink, is to put the historic clashes between the leading liberal Gore Vidal and conservative intellectual William F Buckley Jr at the centre of a new play, Best of Enemies.
Playing Buckley, a man who founded and edited the rightwing, libertarian National Review in 1955 and who worked briefly for the CIA, will be David Harewood, the actor known for his roles in the TV series Homeland and for playing Martin Luther King Jr on stage in The Mountaintop.
The “colour-blind casting” will have been the least of the difficulties Buckley poses for Harewood, the actor believes.
“Philosophically, ideologically and politically, Buckley is as far away from me as one can imagine, and yet the more I read about him the more I’ve come to admire him. It’s a terrific challenge for me on so many levels,” he told the Observer this weekend.
Graham, who has often charted political events in his work, was drawn to the wide-ranging public arguments between the two men because they set a new tone for political debate and broke fresh ground in current affairs broadcasting.
Often lapsing into invective, the 10 debates were moderated by news anchorman Howard K Smith and went out during ABC News coverage of the Republican and Democratic national conventions in Miami Beach and Chicago.
Graham’s play will cover the famous on-air insults exchanged by Vidal and Buckley during the Democratic convention, something that resulted in years-long litigation after Vidal wrote about the exchanges in Esquire magazine. The fiery television shows were also the subject of an acclaimed recent documentary of the same name, in which Kelsey Grammer voiced Buckley and John Lithgow voiced Vidal.
Graham’s new play, to be staged from December at the Young Vic in south London, will be directed by Jeremy Herrin and is to be streamed for audiences at home. The part of Vidal, a stylish iconoclast and noted phrase-maker, will be played by Charles Edwards, seen on television recently in The Crown and in 2012 on stage in This House, Graham’s play, again directed by Herrin, about the parliamentary struggles that dominated Westminster in the 1970s.
“I had a brilliant time working with James and Jeremy on This House, and again I’m so looking forward to examining how an apparently fleeting incident from recent history can throw an unprecedented clarity on the lives we lead today,” said Edwards.
“I’m loving working opposite David as we get ready for our nightly slanging match, and can’t wait for the bell to sound for round one in December.”
Among many other influential pieces of journalism, Buckley gave his name to a famous American political rule, stipulated first in his National Review during the 1964 Republican primary election for the party’s presidential candidate in which Barry Goldwater stood against Nelson Rockefeller. It declared that his publication “will support the rightwardmost viable candidate” for any given office.
Vidal, a distant relative of former vice-president and climate change activist Al Gore, was a noted novelist and the author of many acerbic quotes that have lived on after his death in 2012 at the age of 86. Among the best is the pertinent line: “Fifty per cent of people won’t vote, and fifty per cent don’t read newspapers. I hope it’s the same fifty per cent.”
Vidal’s most infamous altercation, however, was with another American author, Norman Mailer. After being compared to serial killer Charles Manson, the muscular writer headbutted Vidal in the green room of the Dick Cavett Show in 1971.
Six years later, Mailer punched Vidal at a party, prompting the much repeated comeback line from his staggering victim: “Once again, Norman, words fail you.”
