The 1977 TV interviews between the TV celebrity interviewer David Frost and the disgraced US ex-president Richard Nixon quickly became legendary: a summit meeting between representatives of different species. Peter Morgan’s new play about them gives us loads of build-up (“What kind of interview?”), slices of off-screen surround (“David, it was a disaster”), chunks of the actual interviews (“Mr President, why didn’t you burn the tapes?”), and dollops of hindsight (“There was something different about Frost that day”).

There are thrilling moments throughout. The audience laughs aloud in recognition the moment Michael Sheen comes on as David Frost: he’s got the voice, the mannerisms, the blaze. More than that, Sheen – as viscerally exciting an actor as any in Britain today – shows us the hunger of Frost’s ambition, Frost’s vulnerability as he faces disaster, Frost’s canniness as an operator, Frost’s fox-like instinct for the hunt and the kill.

The veteran Broadway star Frank Langella’s style is a tad too suave for Nixon, but he’s an actor capable of tremendous weight and, most valuable here, darkness. The play’s most acute moments are in the glimpses it gives us of Nixon’s unofficial persona: above all the Friday-night drunken phone call he makes to Frost before the final interview. It’s Langella who makes us want to believe these things are true. His gives us flashes of Nixon’s insensate rage, his pathological loneliness, his black need to control: now and then, it’s like looking into a black hole in space.

But this is a callow play. If Morgan were writing Julius Caesar, Mark Antony would no sooner say “For Brutus is an honourable man” than a plebeian would turn to us and say “It was then that I knew for sure that things had changed”. Morgan makes the mistake of having the Watergate expert Jim Reston and Nixon’s adviser Jack Brennan keep up banal narration between and even during scenes. During the final Frost/Nixon interview, Brennan chimes in: “It was at that moment . . . that I realised . . . the situation had become serious.” And Reston is unfailingly banal- after-the-event, as when he wraps up the play with “Maybe, in the end, there is no difference between politics and showbiz.” Doesn’t Morgan realise that Watergate was significantly unlike showbiz? He gathers up prime history like fine wine and then pours it down the drain.
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