Review: DEBATE: BALDWIN VS BUCKLEY, Stone Nest

For those of a certain age, it's a jarring opening. An old school black and white portable TV fires up and there, in grainy, flickering, decidedly non-digital images is Norman St John Stevas, in excitable form in front of a baying audience. It's not Question Time in 1981 (and, anyway, I had a Sony Trinitron then) but the Cambridge Union in 1965 with James Baldwin about to debate (as was not said back then, in this country) William F Buckley.

The question? "Has the American dream been achieved at the expense of the American Negro?" Not the easiest to unravel, but that soon becomes half the delight as, after a few earnest words from the undergrads (represented by Christopher Wareham and Tom Kiteley, who manage to be both charming and irritating the way Oxbridge undergrads are) we're off with The Main Event.

And it's hardly a fair fight now, is it lads? Baldwin not only has right on his side, but also the English language too. We feel as much as hear the novelist's power to draw us into a narrative, the essayist's timing in driving home point after point and, pungently, the activist's fire in the belly. It's a tour-de-force delivered with a performance to match by a magical Teagle F. Bougere, who has a striking resemblance to the man himself, but avoids impersonation in favour of capturing the essence of a towering figure in post-war culture.

When it comes to Buckley, Eric T. Miller gives the National Review's editor and Republican Party totem the smirk of the entitled as he goes through a dispiriting precursor to the alt-Right's playbook of deflection and distraction. It's uncanny how often one hears the empty arguments deployed by the "All Lives Matter"-led feeble counter to "Black Lives Matter" in Buckley's exaggerations, misrepresentations and bad faith. Miller skewers his man with his own words.

This the american vicarious production (first seen in 2020) is on these shores for the first time and hits when interest in both men has been fired by James Graham's award-winning Best Of Enemies and could hardly feel more relevant on the day the Metropolitan Police were excoriated in a report into their toxic culture. Adapted and directed by Christopher McElroen, the pace stays high and the more cerebral elements hit home without ever harming the rip-roaring pace. The perfect sweet spot between a polemic and a drama is located, didactic without being preachy and proving one of the most compelling examples of political theatre I've seen in years.

As an aside, I returned to this brilliant clip by Trevor Noah, which updates the issue and its impacts in the near half-century since the Cambridge debate. It's worth four minutes of anyone's time.

Debate: Baldwin vs Buckley at the Stone Nest until 8 April

Photo Credit: Ellie Kuttz

To post a comment, you must register and login.