Last May, the playwright James Graham found himself in the unfamiliar environs of Question Time. He hadn’t planned to become a spokesperson for theatre during the pandemic, but he happened to be promoting the ITV version of Quiz, his hit 2017 play, just as the sector was screaming for a bailout, and he used his platform wisely. One thing led to another. At the same time, he was researching his new play, Best of Enemies, about 11 landmark televised debates between Gore Vidal and William F Buckley Jr in August 1968.
“I heard the Question Time music and my brain emptied of every single thing I’d ever thought,” he says with a comical shudder. “I’m not naturally good at broadcast media. That’s why it’s fascinating to spend time in the heads of Vidal and Buckley. I was ashamed by the distance between what I could do and what they did. They were impossibly articulate.”
Best of Enemies, which will be staged at London’s Young Vic, is based on a 2015 documentary of the same name. “I went to bed completely obsessed with it,” says Graham. “As a political dweeb, I was embarrassed that I’d never heard about these debates.”
During the 1968 party conventions in America, the struggling ABC network attempted to juice its ratings by pitting Vidal, aristocratic chaos agent of the left, against Buckley, arch-conservative editor of the National Review, for the ensuing culture-war fireworks. It worked all too well. The documentary argues that their combative theatricality (they “hated each other” Graham says) began the process of reducing political disagreement to a wrestling match, yet in 2021 the idea of 10 million viewers watching two eloquent public intellectuals debate the future of a bitterly divided America seems remarkable.
“I’m asking: what is a healthy conversation between two people who disagree?” Graham says. “Like everyone else, I’ve been preoccupied with how we talk to one another on our new platforms and how unhealthy and dangerous that sometimes feels. There’s no exchange of ideas, no listening, no empathy. We’re in a really bad place.”
Physically, at least, the two of us are in a very nice place. We’re having lunch in a busy restaurant near the Young Vic, where Graham is busy rewriting the script during rehearsals. The draft he sent me five days ago is already out of date and the final version will be something else again. “I take a huge block of ice into a rehearsal room and then we start chipping away at it,” he says. “You just have to not care about embarrassing yourself.”
It helps that he is so self-effacing. He shrugs off the bumper ratings of Quiz (“Everyone was bored and stuck at home”) and frequently frets about sounding “wanky”. He also just loves the process of collaboration. A boyish 39, Graham has enough contagious excitement to make anyone consider jacking in their job and joining a theatre company. “It’s the best job in the world,” he says. “I’ve really missed it.”
Vidal is played by Charles Edwards of Downton Abbey and The Crown (for which Graham wrote a standout episode about Prince Charles) and Buckley, counterintuitively, by Homeland’s David Harewood. So in the play’s flashback to Buckley’s 1965 Cambridge Union debate with James Baldwin, both actors are black. “David’s brain is extraordinary,” Graham says. “He pulled me up and said, ‘You can’t temper the more unattractive aspects of his politics because I’m playing him. If he hates black people, I need to own that thought in my head.’”
Buckley was guilty of homophobia as well as racism. In the penultimate debate, Vidal called him a “crypto-Nazi” and Buckley notoriously turned feral, calling Vidal “you queer” and threatening to “sock you in your goddamn face”. Shocking enough in 1968, it seems unforgivable now. How can a modern audience still sympathise with him? “That’s a good question,” Graham says. “The most generous view of Buckley is we’re all capable of being the very worst version of ourselves at the very worst moment. I think audiences can feel, not sympathy, but empathy for his loss of control.”
Graham is known for giving both sides of a political conflict their due. His 2012 breakthrough This House dramatised the scheming of the whips’ offices during the 1974-79 Labour government with such even-handedness that the audience included a cross-bench alliance of politicians. He’s that rare beast: a political playwright who doesn’t tell you where to stand. “A psychologist would probably assign to where I grew up my interest in differences of opinion,” he says.
This was the Nottinghamshire mining village of Annesley, where the miners’ strike led to a kind of civil war. His forthcoming BBC drama Sherwood explores how a double murder years later reopened old wounds. “To this day people cross the street because of a political choice they were forced to make 40 years ago.”
In hits such as Quiz, Ink and 2019’s Channel 4 drama Brexit: The Uncivil War, Graham harnesses the exhilaration of seeing underestimated outsiders pull off a gamechanging upset to even make you root, at least emotionally, for Rupert Murdoch’s Sun or Dominic Cummings’ Vote Leave – before he pulls the rug and exposes the grim ramifications. “Basically, everything is a sports movie when I start writing it,” he says. “It’s either Moneyball or Cool Runnings: the underdogs who change the world. I like missions, and the unintended consequences of those missions.”
Buckley and Vidal are no longer around to pass comment but Murdoch saw Ink twice, which led to mutterings that Graham had a little too much sympathy for the devil. “The very valid question was: should he have been comfortable watching it?” he says. “All I can say is that there was a deliberate intention to make people like him, or people who read his newspapers, feel like they could get a defence, but then they have to sit there and listen to the prosecution.”
Far more controversial was Benedict Cumberbatch’s rendering of Cummings in Brexit: The Uncivil War. The Guardian journalist Carole Cadwalladr accused Graham of portraying Cummings (not then a public figure) as a Sherlockian maverick. Now, after Barnard Castle and all that, does he worry that he wasn’t hard enough? “I go back and forth all the time. Sometimes I think I was too hard, but not very often.” Cummings’ gung-ho contempt for journalists, MPs and judges while he was at No 10 did make Graham think twice. “He was perpetuating this civil war in a really reckless way given that a woman got killed in that referendum. I wish I’d needled that a little more – the consequences of that contrary approach to politics.”
Still, he refuses to villainise easy targets because that would mean preaching to the choir. “It’s inert, dramatically and politically. I have sleepless nights about that balance and I’ll probably never get it right but I go into it sincerely.” For that reason, Graham is strategically cagey about discussing his own voting history. “It’s a genuine desire to allow any audience member to come to the work as cleanly as possible,” he says. “I hope that’s a generous instinct and not a self-preservation instinct. I believe we live in a world of polarised extremes and that would be a barrier.” Although, he adds, his general political orientation is hardly a mystery. “I believe in the power of government and of progress. Basic social democracy.”
He picks his battles, like campaigning for greater diversity in theatre and access to the arts. “We don’t talk about class enough. I come from a working-class background in a town that is culturally deprived. How we find people in Mansfield and Kirkby-in-Ashfield a way to experience live arts, and possibly contemplate making some, has gone unanswered. It’s not just doing it because you think you should but because of all the stories you’ll miss if you don’t. I don’t know why we think of art as this sacred thing that takes place in cities with posh people.”
Graham says he was “a bit of a mess” during lockdown, which he spent alone in south London, but he was certainly productive. Alongside Best of Enemies and Sherwood, he worked on a musical about the televangelist Tammy Faye Messner with Elton John and Jake Shears, the screenplay for an Ink movie, and a livestreamed lockdown play, Bubble. After seven years, he’s still attached to Paul Greengrass’s movie version of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. “It’s still alive as a prospect,” he says. “Where I think I failed is – I was chasing the modern world. That book is already a metaphor so you don’t need to shrink it by saying, ‘Is Big Brother Facebook?’”
His output may seem eclectic but to Graham there’s a common thread: “Great stories from our recent past that are useful vessels for exploring anxieties and tensions that we’re all dealing with today. Quiz was about truth, information and mob mentality. The theme of Ink was populism. Sherwood takes the social divides of Brexit and finds an equivalent in a town torn apart by the legacy of the miners’ strike.” He laughs. “None of my shit gets put on in Germany because it’s so unapologetically micro-British.”
Graham finishes his coffee and heads back to rehearsals, where he will continue to wrestle with the two men who, he says, “live rent-free in my head”. He’s always working towards understanding his characters better, especially the ones he doesn’t agree with. “That’s why I think the death of drama in schools is terrifying,” he says, “because drama forces you to interrogate and empathise with people you don’t like. Twitter is an outrage machine and theatre is an empathy factory.”
Best of Enemies is at the Young Vic, London, 3 December-22 January.
