Review: Best of Enemies

Best of Enemies by James Graham was a play that had me gripped from the very start due to its unique technique of having cast members playing audience members in the prologue – a method that I have not seen used since university.

This political play is inspired by the documentary by Morgan Leville and Robert Gordon that told the story of the 1968 televised debates between Gore Vidal and William F Buckley Jr. When reading the script, it is clear to see why the performances of the show won multiple awards. The play captures the clash between the two characters in the lead up to the presidential election.

Verbatim is used within the play in a smart way, making it a brilliant case study for your drama class. All scenes in front of the camera are verbatim, with Graham using a selection of dialogue and insults from the studio televised debates, while the off-camera scenes are left to the playwright's imagination. This has allowed Graham to not only dramatise a situation that was compelling for TV audiences at the time, but also add another dimension to the play.

What really stands out in this political drama is that Graham is empathetic to both sides. This mix of verbatim and nonverbatim can lead to interesting conversations in the classroom about a playwright's creativity and how verbatim may be used, perhaps in devised work. This would therefore be a compelling text to use as a stimulus for the A Level devising unit.

One of my favourite verbatim techniques in the play is the use of audio recordings from the time and directs the characters to lip sync in the stage directions. Exploring this idea with students for devised work could lead to some interesting ideas and concepts for the students’ work, as could looking at how Graham captures the assassinations of President Kennedy and Martin Luther King.

These monumental moments in American history, along with other key moments of the time that are explored in the play, could be a captivating starting point for students’ work and allows a range of themes to be explored. For me, the epilogue is what really made this play stand out. This is a great play to explore with A Level Drama, History and Politics students.