While the USA’s two main political parties were choosing their presidential nominees in 1968, ABC Television hosted political debates between the left wing novelist Gore Vidal and the right wing commentator William F. Buckley.  The two men loathed each other.  Their exchanges were erudite, witty, and sometimes brutal, and they did wonders for ABC’s ratings.

Playwright James Graham specialises in turning real political stories into drama.  His play This House turned into gripping theatre the story of the 1974-9 Labour government’s struggle to survive with a tiny majority.  

This one gets off to a rollicking start, with the cameo appearance of a gloriously smug and self-regarding Tariq Ali, and a management meeting at the television company where the executives are required to exercise before the meeting and to stand during it, to oxygenate their brains. 

In the debate scenes, the actors speak the words that Vidal and Buckley actually spoke. Outside the debates, they confer with their advisers about how to beat the other man, and – vain in a way that only television can make people – they protest to the network that the other man is getting more of the camera.

Charles Edwards is a wonderful Vidal – dazzled by his own cleverness, but with an awful lot of cleverness to be dazzled by; witty, subtle, serpentine, but at the end sincerely horrified by the cruelty and unfairness of the sort of America his opponent promotes.