The devil has the best tunes, and the villain the best roles. The return to the London stage in August of Richard Milhous Nixon is a welcome comeback for satanic charisma. The Broadway actor Frank Langella will be playing Nixon in Frost/Nixon, a new play at the Donmar Warehouse based on the interview conducted by David Frost in which Nixon confessed his Watergate guilt.
The first to spot Nixon's stage potential was British playwright David Edgar, whose Dick Deterred (1974) was a pastiche verse parody of Richard III. Then John Adams composed the opera Nixon in China (1987) charting the president's historic meeting with Chairman Mao in 1972. Nixon died in 1994, but rose from the dead in Oliver Stone's mesmerising 1995 biopic starring Anthony Hopkins, and Russell Lees's Nixon's Nixon (1997), a dialogue between Nixon and Henry Kissinger on the eve of his resignation.
The new play is written by Peter Morgan, author of the television drama The Deal, about Tony Blair and Gordon Brown's famous pact. But not even the brilliant Welsh actor Michael Sheen (who has the part of David Frost in the new play) could make Blair a compelling dramatic presence. In fact, among postwar world leaders, only Margaret Thatcher has compared with Nixon for qualities of stage villainy—in countless dramas from 1980s agitprop to the current West End hits Billy Elliott and David Eldridge's Market Boy at the National, where she descends like a vampiric goddess as the spirit of free marketeering. Neither Blair, nor even Bush, have yet been dramatically elevated to the status of true villain. In David Hare's anti-Iraq war Stuff Happens, Bush even comes over as being a man of honest convictions. Maybe the left has forgotten how to demonise, or maybe Nixon and Thatcher were just too good to make up.
The Edinburgh festival embraces art?
Visitors to this year's festival may sense a change in the cultural temperature. Gone is the flamboyant Timothy Clifford, director of the National Galleries. In his place is the quietly spoken John Leighton, formerly of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, whose first exhibition is of, er, Van Gogh. (In fact, that's a coincidence—the exhibition was fixed years ago.) Leighton, however, is likely to bring an end to the state of war between the festival and the galleries, which prevented any joint programming between them. Brian McMaster, as taciturn as Clifford was talkative, refused to include NGS exhibitions in the Festival programme. But he also stands down this year, to be succeeded by the loquacious Australian Jonathan Mills. One of the first contacts Mills made in Edinburgh was with Leighton. Perhaps a Degas-Tchaikovsky theme for next year's festival, then?
Return of sculpture
Sculpture is getting a lift from unlikely sources. For years, Madeleine Bessborough at Roche Court in Wiltshire, the Cass Foundation at Goodwood and the Yorkshire sculpture park near Wakefield have been showing off large-scale sculpture. But now the private owners of stately homes have woken up to the allure of art and landscape. Ragley Hall in Worcestershire is home to the Jerwood Foundation's sculpture collection; David Rocksavage at Houghton Hall has a James Turrell and a Richard Long to draw in urban sophisticates as well as seaside crowds; the London director of the Gagosian, Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst has opened her romantic family seat, Sudeley Castle, to a show of leading contemporary sculptors and the grandest of them all, the Duke of Devonshire, is bringing a Sotheby's sculpture sale to the grounds of Chatsworth.
