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London,
Nicholas de Jongh's rating
Reader rating
Dir: Michael Grandage.
Cast: Michael Sheen, Frank Langella, Elliot Cowan, Corey Johnson, Vincent Marzello, Rufus Wright
Description: Five years after the foiled break-in at the Democratic Party's National Committee headquarters in Washington's Watergate Hotel and the scandal that ensued, David Frost interviewed Richard Nixon. Could the talk-show host elicit an apology from the man at the centre of the controversy? Drama by Peter Morgan, directed by Michael Grandage.
Trains: Tube: Piccadilly Circus 
Phone: 0870950 0915
Extraordinary: Frank Langella as Richard Nixon
No other West End production surpasses Peter Morgan's Frost/Nixon for serious-minded excitement and black comedy, or offers a performance to which that misused adjective "great" applies.
Premiered and praised at the Donmar in August, this will-he-admit-he-dunnit and semi-documentary won a $3.5million deal for the movie version. No wonder. Morgan offers a riveting, psychologically astute dramatisation of the high-wire process by which chat-show host David Frost, crucially armed with fresh facts from investigative writer James Reston, succeeded where politicians and journalists, FBI agents and lawyers had failed. He forced a TV admission from President Nixon that he broke the law and concealed evidence of his his criminality.
As Nixon, Frank Langella manages an extraordinary acting feat. It's nothing to do with impersonation. It's of a kind I've seen no actor achieve since my childhood experience of Olivier's blacked-up Othello. When the President faces incriminatingevidence Langella, magnified on a TV screen, undergoes a physical transformation in the hot flush of nemesis. The charisma and phoney self- confidence this Nixon has exuded drains away.
Face and lips tremble with unheard sobs, eyes widen and bulge, as if expressive of sublimated fury. Langella makes this Lucifer-like fall oddly pathetic and terrible.
Michael Sheen's Frost, already an expert piece of mimicry, has magnificently deepened and darkened. He now captures the apolitical Frost's strange mix of naivete, optimism and insecurity. In scenes of rueful comedy, he negotiates to win Nixon for a marathon interview and is outwitted on TV by Langella's wily Nixon until a late, killer-question. The impression of a blood-sports contest from which Nixon retires blooded, blowed and ruined is never far away.
Morgan's provocative contention is that the President almost wished Frost to release him from guilt's bondage: an invented late-night phone conversation from a drunken Nixon to sleepy Frost suggests the President felt his TV inquisitor was, like himself, a modestly-born outsider, contending with high-society snobs and winning. Morgan implies Nixon even admired Frost for the sexual and socialising flair he lacked.
Michael Grandage's swift, brilliant production, performed on a virtually bare stage, with large-screen film helping advance the action and expose Langella in revelatory close-up, is bolstered by Corey Johnson as Nixon's suspicious Chief of staff and Elliot Cowan's bloodhound investigator who goes in for the kill. I was enthralled, amused and enlightened.
Until 3 February (0870 950 0915).
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
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