The night before last I saw the best film I’ve seen for ages – actually, it was the only film I’ve seen for ages, since I’m at the theatre most nights and hardly ever actually get to the cinema much. But having loved Frost/Nixon, and having lately interviewed both Michael Sheen (from that play) and Alex Jennings (currently in The Alchemist at the National) both of whom told me about their roles as respectively Tony Blair and Prince Charles in The Queen – not to mention an array of other theatrical talent, from Helen McCrory as Cherie Blair and Roger Allam as the Queen’s Private Secretary to Robin Soans as the Queen’s Equerry – I was dying to see it.
Both are scripted by Peter Morgan; and his behind-the-scenes dramatic speculations, whether of the circumstances behind the Frost-Nixon TV interviews or here of the Royal Family’s apparently muted reaction to the death of Diana that was counterbalanced with the very public grieving that took place all over the country, are both riveting spectacles that make you feel as if you’re a fly-on-the-wall; and though we can’t be quite sure what really took place behind those closed doors, Morgan takes us right into the hearts and minds of these living people. It feels utterly inhabited, and utterly real, even as you know its only being minutely imagined. But the fiction is gloriously sustained alongside the reality with the seamless juxtaposition of real documentary footage from the period.
As I watched The Queen, I could only speculate: what would the real-life Queen and her family would make of it? I would dearly love to know. But even if we can’t find that out yet – if ever – an interview in today’s Daily Telegraph with David Frost lifts the lid on what Frost makes of Frost/Nixon, and it’s remarkable both for the generosity of Frost’s response – “my overall reaction is that this is as exciting a night as you are likely to get in the theatre this year” – but also for the shafts of insight he also provides of what really happened. The fictional phone call between the two men that Morgan dramatises near the end of the play, in which the wilderness beckons for the loser, Frost characterises as a “masterstroke” – “It captures the Nixonian self-pity and his sense of being on the wrong side of the tracks.” But he adds that he doesn’t think the line where The Frost character says of Nixon, “He wants me to finish him” is “remotely true, but it’s a good line. I don’t think Nixon was that generous.”
Frost, who didn’t have artistic control over the play, uses the opportunity of the interview to put the record straight on a few other things. “I’m delighted it’s had such an enormous success. Obviously, I would have preferred that it be accurate as well.” Some of them are errors of record that Frost wants to put straight: for instance, the suggestion that his Australian series had been scrapped, as had his New York show. “It’s a detail, but I did specials whenever I went out to Australia, so there was no series to be cancelled. And The David Frost Show (in America) was 750 editions, but it ended some years before, in June of 72. All those things get compressed.” Nor did Nixon ever give a filibustering answer of 23 minutes: “That’s dopey. In television, three minutes is an eternity, and even someone who had never conducted an interview before would ever let anybody, including the President of the United States, go on for 23 minutes.”
Frost here, however, clearly goes on for a great deal longer than 23 minutes in his interview with the Telegraph’s Jasper Rees, and it’s worth savouring every minute. Especially when he replays the final “confession”, the one in which Frost elicited the admission, “I let down the American people, the whole system of government, the hopes and dreams of all those young people” – as Frost puts it, “one was incredibly aware of something very significant having happened”; and that’s also the triumph of Morgan’s play, as directed by Michael Grandage and ferociously played by Michael Sheen (as Frost) and Frank Langella (as Nixon): it leaves you in no doubt that this is a searingly significant play.
