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Since Peter Morgan’s Frost/Nixon 20 years ago, pieces about celebrated TV interviews have trended – James Graham’s Best Of Enemies, Doug Wright’s Goodnight, Oscar and two TV dramas about Emily Maitlis and the sweat-less then Prince Andrew. A play about Michael Parkinson’s studio bouts with Muhammad Ali is in preparation.
Now A Thing Of Beauty by Wendy Oberman and Jonathan Lewis imagines Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s propagandist film director (Triumph Of The Will) and rumoured lover, in London in 1972 to talk to the BBC. Or partly imagines: she made a programme with the corporation that year, although the interviewer was the admirable journalist-playwright Keith Dewhurst rather than, as on stage, Harry Adams – an alcoholic philanderer with a grim private shame – who the playwrights presumably invented to allow historical falsifications such as Adams’s spectacular crossing of an ethical boundary.
An attraction of showbiz interview plays is that they channel the pivotal moment in the current super-genre of crime fiction: the suspect interrogation. In cases such as Riefenstahl’s – Nazi hangers-on who hung on to a postwar career – the television deposition became a surrogate for legal interrogation.
Imogen Stubbs is electrifying as Riefenstahl – by turns pugnacious and flirtatious, but above all inventively evasive. The performance shows how a genius of on-screen presentation was an expert self-propagandist, knowing that Adams hopes to trap her into pro-Hitlerism and antisemitism, so using every ruse to reduce and seduce him. When Riefenstahl first speaks in the formal interview – Stubbs neatly differentiating public and private personae – there is a chill as deep as when the aged, escaped Hitler addresses the audience in Christopher Hampton’s adaptation of George Steiner’s The Portage to San Cristobal Of AH (surely due a revival).
A Thing Of Beauty has a televisual rhythm of short scenes divided by musical stings (live cello from Oona Lowther). The world of British TV at its peak – imperious executives, perfectionist technicians, young women as perks for the boss – feels true, with fine supporting work from Tony Bell as burning-out TV star Adams and Sophie McMahon as the era’s standard target practice for misogynists.
An off note is that BBC One is planning to clear a peak-time slot for the chat, whereas in reality unrepentant Nazis – Riefenstahl, Albert Speer, Winifred Wagner – were usually on BBC Two, where they sometimes seemed to punctuate the snooker. Speer, Hitler’s town planner, died while in London for his latest shifty grilling on Newsnight.
Their British TV visibility came from a moral determination to address how the Holocaust could have happened. That question remains burning, but the play’s central question – the moral responsibility of those who saw and knew but didn’t act – is topical to many recent and current cases.
A short run with a big star suggests hopes of the show going elsewhere, which – perhaps with some fiddly subplotting trimmed – it should.
