Debate: Baldwin Vs Buckley review

Recreating a 1965 debate held at Cambridge University, this taut verbatim play – written and directed by Christopher McElroen – dramatises a historic clash of ideas. On one side of the argument was African-American activist and author James Baldwin, a significant figure in the civil rights movement. On the other, notorious conservative pundit William F Buckley Jr – the same belligerent broadcaster whose televised clashes with Gore Vidal featured in James Graham’s searing Best of Enemies. While comparisons between the two plays are inevitable, this is the more tightly focused of the two pieces, aiming only to re-enact a single meeting rather than to dig more deeply into the social context or the speakers’ personalities.

McElroen’s unfussy, bare-bones staging uses just a few chairs and an old black-and-white TV set, which periodically plays snippets of grainy archive footage. McElroen faithfully recreates the restrained atmosphere of a formal debate and while the show feels a little stiff at times, it never becomes static: the performers prowl about, addressing their arguments to individual audience members.

McElroen lets the text speak for itself, revealing a little of each speaker’s personality along the way. Baldwin’s oratory is filled with dramatic imagery and fierce moral indignation. By contrast, despite Buckley’s superficial charm and eloquence, his arguments are hollow, his pretence of enlightened civility a mask for the barbarity of his beliefs. It’s striking, though perhaps unsurprising, how little conservative arguments have evolved in the past 60 years. Buckley rolls out the same nonsensical talking points that today’s white supremacists still deploy to justify their despicable world view that slavery existed before the transatlantic trade, that systemic exploitation somehow leads to improved economic prospects for those being exploited and that, ultimately, all authority stems from the power to subjugate others violently.

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