Theatre

If President Nixon hadn’t existed, some modern-day Shakespeare would have had to invent him. In a century where dramatists like Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller dragged American tragedy triumphantly into the domestic arena, the true story of Nixon’s downfall suddenly elevated it to imperial levels again. While President Kennedy may have seduced most of the world, Nixon revealed a hydra-headed realm of conspiracy that seemed as mythically dark as the Camelot myth was superficially golden. Since his resignation in August 1974, his murkily paradoxical legacy has inspired artists as diverse as Oliver Stone, the Manic Street Preachers and the scriptwriters of ‘The Simpsons’.

Yet though Nixon has never truly faded from the cultural memory, 2006 has been a bumper year even by his standards. Peter Sellars’s galvanising production of John Adams’s opera ‘Nixon in China’ was revived in June; President Logan in the hit TV series ‘24’ was clearly modelled on Tricky Dicky; and now, the Donmar Warehouse is about to open Peter Morgan’s new play ‘Frost/Nixon’. True we have another Republican president in the White House with plummeting popularity ratings, but are there other reasons why Nixon seems so apposite as the villain de nos jours? Feature continues

Artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse Michael Grandage pleads to no complicity in this collective exhumation: ‘When the script landed on my desk last year, as far as I was aware there were no other Nixon-related projects coming up.’ However, he admits that in rehearsals, ‘Every single time you’re looking for some sort of parallel to help a scene along, you think, “Hang on, there was an analogy on this morning’s news.”’ Some of this, he declares, is obviously to do with America’s disastrous foreign policy – while Nixon may have overseen the ending of the Vietnam War, both his heavy bombing campaigns and his involvement of Cambodia famously led to protests that prefigured the current public rage about the Iraq invasion. What Grandage doesn’t say, but also seems highly relevant, is that as New Labour becomes increasingly mired in accusations of misjudgment and corruption, our receptiveness has surely intensified to debates about politics at its most pockmarked. It is, of course, more than tuning into the zeitgeist that makes Morgan’s drama a potential highlight for the theatrical drought that tends to hit London in late summer.