[Lifestlye] Baldwin v Buckley: how the ‘debate play’ made a riveting resurgence

[BirSaNN]

Verbal clashes from history are being thrillingly restaged for modern audiences. Do these grand battles prove we’ve lost the art of disagreement? And could watching them anew change the politics of tomorrow?

James Graham’s play Best of Enemies recently brought to life the gladiatorial televised clashes between Gore Vidal and William F Buckley Jr in the lead-up to the 1968 US presidential election. Tucked inside that drama was a fleeting mention of the historic debate between the white, conservative Buckley and the Black American civil rights activist James Baldwin. It felt, potentially, like it could make a play in its own right.

A new production stages just that momentous confrontation in verbatim form. Debate: Baldwin v Buckley re-enacts in full the Cambridge University Union head-to-head from February 1965, when it was recorded and broadcast by the BBC.

First re-created on screen during the lockdown of 2020, it has since been staged off-Broadway and now makes its UK premiere at Stone Nest in London’s West End. Adapted and directed by Christopher McElroen, it features Teagle F Bougere as Baldwin and Eric T Miller as Buckley.

Baldwin and Buckley have half an hour a piece to make their case for or against the motion of the debate: “The American Dream is at the Expense of the American Negro.” We follow their logic without interruption in the debating chamber, Baldwin arguing for civil rights and for America to acknowledge the sins of its past, while Buckley makes the case for white conservative values.

McElroen says the decision to stage the debate this way came after the murder of George Floyd, in the midst of the Black Lives Matter protests. “It addressed the racial conflict that the country was navigating yet again.”

Political theatre has a long and fine British tradition, from Shakespeare’s history plays to David Hare’s work and Graham’s own oeuvre – which includes This House and The Vote. But the “debate play” is something apart; drawing on the ancient Athenian art of rhetoric and persuasion, it speaks to us directly of issues in our world. It is, by comparison, a rarity these days but we see it in such highly compelling instances as Aaron Sorkin’s adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird, whose courtroom debate was arguably its strongest feature. There is also David Mamet’s recently revived and volcanic two-hander, Oleanna, which is not formally constructed as a debate but presents two oppositional viewpoints on political correctness in university campuses with immense force, and allows us to view its subject from both sides.

An even more current example is the New Diorama’s musical, After the Act, which features parliamentary debate around Section 28 (which legislated against teaching homosexuality in British schools) and manages to bring satirical comedy to the debate form.

In the case of McElroen’s production, nothing extraneous is added to the words exchanged between Baldwin and Buckley. Unlike Best of Enemies, which couches the infamous debates within greater fictive material, this is a pure reconstruction of the original. “To frame the debate within a bigger story would be like killing a fly with a sledgehammer,” says McElroen. “The material is James Baldwin and William F Buckley Jr – two amazing intellectuals on opposite sides of the political spectrum. The conflict is inherent in that, you don’t need to do anything to it.”

link: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2023/mar/17/baldwin-v-buckley-how-the-debate-play-made-a-riveting-resurgence