A recent article in the New York Times claims that theatre needs to reinvent itself if it is to regain its relevance and cultural centrality. Its writer should see Nixon's Nixon. There is no way that television or cinema could do what this play does so brilliantly well: which is to take two actors and a small space, and out of them reprise a crucial moment in the history of America and the world. It does it with economy, illumination, great wit and – given the prima facie unattractiveness of the protagonists: sweating "Tricky Dicky" Nixon, liar and cheat, and the wooden flat-voiced menacing Henry Kissinger – surprising tenderness. This is theatre at its most potent, a species of magic, weaving whole worlds out of a few fine threads.
    In this case the threads are a very good script by Russell Lees, and two very good actors in Keith Jochim as Nixon and Tim Donoghue as Kissinger. Lees places his characters on the tip of a needle-sharp moment of history: the night before Nixon's resignation in August 1974. It is historical fact that Kissinger visited Nixon in the Lincoln Sitting Room in the White House on that night, and stayed three hours. No one knows what happened, or what was said the tape machines were not running – so Lees has taken the opportunity to invent a distraught Nixon reminiscing about triumphs, and more than half hoping he (or he and Kissinger) can somehow, by some stroke, devise an escape from his fate. Earlier in the day a delegation of Republican senators had called on Nixon and told him that the game was up. Even so Lees has the wily lifelong politician, twisting and turning like a fox in a cage, look for the slimmest chink of light suggesting a route out – or more accurately: a route to stay in the presidency
    In reviewing the foreign relations triumphs of his presidency – the rapprochement with China, the nuclear weapons treaty with Russia – Lees's Nixon has an unwilling Kissinger act out with him his encounters with Brezhnev and Mao. It is hilarious and revealing. As the two men drink, so the impersonations get more lurid – and with them the schemes to keep Nixon in the White House, including a CIA-sponsored "border incident" between China and Russia precipitating an international crisis requiring Nixon to remain in office. Kissinger's concern is not to save Nixon, but his own job as Secretary of State. Out of the clash and combination of ambition, failure, trouble, memory and defeat, Lees gives a funny and wonderfully instructive commentary on a piece of vivid contemporary history.
     This is excellent theatre, excellently done, and not to be missed.
AC Grayling