Following critical acclaim in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and London (where it played at Stone Nest in 2023), ‘the american vicarious’ bring their radically staged production, Debate – Baldwin vs Buckley, back to the capital at Wilton’s Music Hall this week.
The play reconstructs, or reimagines, the historic Cambridge Union debate of 1965, where Black civil rights activist and author James Baldwin and conservative intellectual William F Buckley were invited to speak for and against the motion “Is the American Dream at the expense of the American Negro?”
You can see the whole debate as it played out in 1965 thanks to a video captured at the time, and available on YouTube. In fact, this production makes use of it on the screen behind the stage to scene-set, introduce the participants, and offer a sense of the reception in the hall.
Eric T Miller as Buckley has been with the production since its inception in 2020, along with director Christopher McElroen. The impetus of bringing Debate – Baldwin vs Buckley to the stage was the killing of George Floyd, a Black American, cut down by a white police officer.
Joined by Arnell Powell as Baldwin, with Christopher Wareham and Tom Kiteley as the students for and against the motion, the actors form a tight and compelling quartet, arranged on chairs facing up and standing up to address us with their arguments. No one attempts to impersonate the voices of either Baldwin or Buckley.
Instead, as ‘the american vicarious’ put it on their website, “our aim has been to return their words – still searing, still unresolved – to public to public conversation through the voices of contemporary artists”.
At the time of the original debate, lynchings were still taking place in the American South despite the Civil Rights Act of 1964 dismantling the legal framework of ‘Jim Crow’.
Even in the Northern states of America, there were ‘sundown’ towns which theeatened Black people who were found there after dark. There was a sense of fear, intolerance, and downright disgust for those who, as Oscar Hammerstein II put it in “Carefully Taught”, a song in South Pacific, “have skin of a different shade”.
Now, some six decades later, it has to be asked if little has changed. Buckley’s sneering, silky and White Supremacist rhetoric has echoes in some speeches we hear today. It is acceptable, even, for a Black person to be shot dead for knocking on a door in a strange neighbourhood.
There has been a Black President, yes, but the country now buckles under a raft of prejudice against minorities and a rising, unsettling intolerance.
To watch Debate – Baldwin vs Buckley enacted on stage is a riveting experience. Powell’s performance as Baldwin captures a lifetime of little hurts and slights that he can see affecting his children.
Despite his ‘acceptance’ as a celebrated author, he can still notice acts of refused service, inflated prices, ignorance and downright harm.
For Miller’s Buckley, the debate is a chance to showboat, to attempt to ingratiate his rhetoric and opinions with the audience as he belittles and disdains the arguments of the man he addresses with false politeness.
For Buckley, the motion is not just theoretical; it is a fight for the American Dream and the American Constitution.
Many conservatives saw the Civil Rights movement as a threat to the “American way of life,” but were not able to describe how that sat alongside “all men are equal” when many were still subject to cheap labour and a sense of revulsion from those walking alongside them.
No surprise that Buckley dismisses the “plight of the American Negro” as their failure to find opportunities for “their people”.
Baldwin makes a point that Black children assume they are white for a long time, from birth until they see otherwise. Children do not see differences or act on prejudice until they are “Carefully Taught” about it.
To quote Hammerstein again, “to hate all the people your relatives hate”. In Debate – Baldwin vs Buckley, that frisson of hate and anger in the room is palpable and electric.
The archive film may have shown warm applause for both sides of the argument, but in Wilton’s auditorium, it was clear that the majority felt the modern implications of the debate all too clearly.
The questions remain the same, as a 21st-century America seems less likely to embrace its rich diversity with every passing day.
****
Debate – Baldwin vs Buckley is at Wilton’s Music Hall until 7 Feb 2026. Follow the show website for more information.
Photo credit: the american vicarious
Note: an earlier version of this review misattributed the part of Baldwin to the original actor in the production.