There's a crisis of goodness in our politics

THEATRE Our foremost political playwright, James Graham, has turned his attention to the origins of the culture wars, he tells Nick Clark

- Nick Clark

THE problem for writers chronicling recent history, especially on divisive issues, is that they might have to meet their subjects. Fortunately for James Graham, famously the nicest man in British showbusiness, no-one has swung for him yet, not even irascible media baron Rupert Murdoch, the subject of his play Ink.

They met after Murdoch saw the show in London — it started at the Almeida in 2017 before transferring to the West End. So how did it go? “Um… yeah,” Graham smiles. “He didn’t say much… But he didn’t throw me out of the window or take my house away in a libel suit!”

If Murdoch didn’t say much, Dominic Cummings, the focus of Graham’s 2019 TV drama Brexit: The Uncivil War, was even less forthcoming. “He’s never spoken to me about it. We were in touch quite a lot during research and I met him a few times. But he hasn’t expressed a view on what he thinks.”

Graham doesn’t have to worry about meeting the protagonists of his new West End show Best of Enemies — transferring from the Young Vic, where it opened last December. Both conservative commentator William F Buckley and liberal writer Gore Vidal died more than a decade ago. But their story remains extraordinarily relevant today.

Best of Enemies focuses on the birth of the TV political-debate-as-combat. In 1968, a year of protest that divided America, the pair went head-to-head over a series of televised debates around the Democratic convention. They start the play with high-minded ideals and end up screaming at each other, pre-empting today’s increasingly bad-tempered political dialogue.