"Frost/Nixon". St John's College Auditorium

St John’s College is full of surprises.

The first is that it’s like a rabbit warren. Getting from the front door to the auditorium in darkness involves endless zig-zags round pillars and double-backs through niches that turn out to be passageways. Maybe the original architects were trying to confuse an approaching army.

The second surprise is that, once you have found the auditorium, it turns out to be probably the best-equipped theatrical space in any college – possibly in town, with the exception of the Oxford Playhouse. It is blessed with an extensive lighting rig, proper wings, backstage space, a real raised stage with a sprung, wooden floor, and a comfortable, gently raked auditorium with a technical control area at the back. Why is it not being used for student productions on a weekly basis, like Keble’s O’Reilly Theatre, or Balliol’s Michael Pilch Studio? It’s perfect.

And the third surprise is that it can put on a college play, in which the entire cast and crew come only from St John’s, and yet it’s as well-produced and acted as the best shows on offer all term.

Frost/Nixon, Peter (The Crown, Bohemian Rhapsody) Morgan’s 2008 play about David Frost’s oh-so-nearly-abortive interviews with the disgraced former President, seems at first sight an odd choice for a college play. Most of the students in the audience don’t have a clue who David Frost was, and for many of them even Watergate is about as relevant as the Repeal of the Corn Laws. But the clash of personalities is so compelling, and the behind-the-scenes story of how Frost and his team pulled it off is so unlikely, that any problems of historical awareness are quickly flung aside. Instead, we are treated to some brilliantly nuanced performances and a production with pace, style and faultless comic timing (even though it did start 15 minutes late).

As David Frost, Sol Woodroffe is if anything even more of a seductive chancer than Frost himself. He is every inch the entertainer, and has jettisoned the seventies oiliness that, if truth be told, used to drip from the great chat-show host’s lop-sided smirk. And as Richard Nixon, Rohan Joshi simply channels the President. Joshi is a fresher, in his second term at university. But he is thoroughly convincing as a 64-year-old American. His slightly breathless drawl, his weary but determined shoulders, even the way he does his daily jogging on the spot, bespeak age and fading power. He sounds like James Stewart doing Richard Nixon – and what could be better than that? One of Stewart’s greatest roles, in Mr Smith Goes to Washington, was as an idealistic politician. He would have made a great Nixon, and through Joshi, he does.

The supporting cast are no less impressive (St John’s continuing to surprise). Blaze Pierzchniak as current affairs producer John Birt doesn’t just give a convincing performance. He also looks astonishingly like the actual young John Birt – who would go on to be Director-General of the BBC. And Georgina Cooper as narrator-cum-researcher Jim Reston delivers up a coolly detached commentary on the action in an American accent that professional voice trainers would grade as 90% there without a single lesson.

But what makes this production really special are two features, clearly introduced deliberately for our present times, which weren’t present when the play was first mounted in 2008.

First, Elspeth Rogers and her cast have teased out a half-buried but unmistakeable sexual fascination that exists between the two macho adversaries. Nixon in particular finds Frost pretty much irresistible. He can’t stop admiring Frost’s Italian shoes, and desires them despite being advised by his Chief of Staff that they are ‘effeminate’. The night before their final encounter, he calls Frost in his hotel room and gives him a rousing speech which, in the hands of Joshi and Woodroffe, reaches a quasi-sexual climax, leaving the former President spent and sweating. They are, in that Kate Beaton sense, ‘nemeses’ – desperate to keep their enemy’s picture on the wall above their beds, and unable to stop gazing at it.

The other outstanding feature, which truly delivers the killer punch of this show, is the perspective it affords on the state of American politics today.

Nixon’s crime was that he colluded in covering up his administration’s involvement in a break-in at his opponent’s offices. As he said then – and says again in Morgan’s play – rather than debase the office of President by having a trial, he chose to stand down. As a result, his name is reviled by history, and he will forever be associated with corruption and duplicity.

It is impossible to hear those words, and not to reflect on the multiple ongoing trials of Donald Trump; to hear him willingly, time and again, through fighting those cases, debase the office of President; and to look forward a few months to his increasingly likely re-election. Compared to Trump’s sexual wrongdoings, security breaches, and blatant riot-inciting, Nixon’s crime seems so anodyne that the furore it caused is almost perplexing. Whisper it, but, compared to Trump, he almost looks innocent. As Jim Reston says to Frost, ‘The American people need a conviction’. How things have changed. 

This show was performed on the very day that the US Supreme Court held hearings to establish whether Trump can stand for President after inciting an insurrection against the country he was supposed to lead. The contrast is sobering. In the words of Spinal Tap’s David St Hubbins: ‘Too much fucking perspective.’