So...

I have to do an interview for the electronic press kit (?) the gist of the discussion topics being

Who is/was David Frost

Well... Talk show host, playboy, grand inquisitor, friendly neighborhood confidante, Methodist, satirist, Cambridge graduate, ubiquitous figure while I was growing up

Peter Morgan's gift for making movies or plays about people from history that you think you know and then showing you a side of them you never knew existed.

Well.. he seems to have a gift for imagining how people are when they are not 'on', what they get up to outside the glare of the spotlight, plucking the celebrity gods down to a mortal level to explore a common humanity

The play is not just 2 talking heads. Discuss the other characters in the play and what they bring to the story.

Well... the other characters remind us that 'no man is an island'; that co-operation and teamwork are as much a factor in achieving objectives as individual talent/genius/ambition. David has a girlfriend, a producer and a team of advisers/crack investigators/researchers who enable him to score his gotcha

The emotional journey the play takes you on- sympathy, disbelief, tenseness, suspense, amusement. How does the audience feel at the climax of the play?

Emotional journey ??Well.. you start off one place in your thinking and feeling and end up somewhere else  2 hours later. The nature of the territory travelled has something to do with the degree to which the writer has made the characters sympathetic and the actors can produce empathy. For the amateur psychologist, Peter presents the interview strategies then allows glimpses of that strategy being implemented which reveals the key to satisfying constructure; knowing about set up and pay off.

At the climax of the play, the audience feels that they need to pee out of excitement and bladder pressure.

The humor of the play

Seeing self-important characters slipping on intellectual banana skins and getting egg on their false faces

What makes a play good, how are plays different from musicals and what do audiences get out of a straight play that they can't get out of any other medium. How does Frost/Nixon deliver on that?

Good writing makes a play good. Snappy dialogue, fascinating speech rhythms, interesting themes, harmonious structure

Plays are different from musicals in that there are no songs, except when there is singing. They are usually quieter and make more demands of an audience to listen and be attentive.

Audiences get an intellectual and emotional workout. F/N delivers in that people leave the theatre thinking they are cleverer than they were when they came into it

Production value of the play, the big TV monitor & TV's overall role in the production.

Audiences are now so used to television that they rarely question how they are manipulated by the medium. People tend to respond negatively if the think they are being illicitly hypnotized. So the screen, any kind of screen, is seen in a scene on a stage at some stage as a metaphor for the interface between seeming reality and the truth...OK

Simple, eh?

A concern has drifted down that the producers are worried that people are not coming to see the show and filling the 3000 seat venues because they think it is just a history lesson.  

So what else is the show? 

A dynamic and exciting ensemble piece, a multi-media experience, a fashion show for seventies garb, all wrapped up in a psychological thriller

why should people go see a play anyway? 

The sanctimonious answer- Cos its good for their moral and spiritual health

The highbrow answer- the theatre is an engine of democracy, a space that people come to in order to meditate on the themes of justice and mercy and man's relationship to forces outside and inside of him. To experience pity and fear in catharsis

The practical answer- It gets them out of the house

All this makes want to check in with Howard Barker who for me is still the most inspiring visionary when it comes at articulating the processes of theatre. He can sound almost fundamentalist at times in his 'Art has no duty' position

That's entertainment!