Frost/Nixon, by Peter Morgan, directed by Roger Hodgman. Designed by Richard Roberts, costumes by Judith Cobb, lighting by Matt Scott, composer Paul Grabowsky. With John Adam, Jada Alberts, Bruce Myles, Marshall Napier, Yalin Ozucelik, Neil Pigot, Teague Rook, Kat Stewart, David Trendinnick and Greg Ulfan. Melbourne Theatre Company @ the Fairfax Studio, Victorian Arts Centre, until July 5. Bookings: 1300 723 038.

In contemporary politics, image is all. It was once said that one picture is worth a thousand words: in these hypermediated times, it’s worth a lot more than that. Words have to be listened to and considered, but a single image drives straight into the collective subconscious.

Every gesture counts. The current US Democratic race is a hallucinatory exercise in image management: Hillary Clinton getting down with the working classes, or Barak Obama’s frantic damage control over the release of pictures where he is supposedly wearing “Muslim” garb.

Television asserted its dominance in the 1960s, when Richard Nixon could not compete with the telegenic John F Kennedy. His tendency to sweat and his “shifty eyes” earned him the epithet “Tricky Dicky”.

Peter Morgan’s play focuses on this shift by dramatising the famous interviews Nixon conducted with British talk show host David Frost in 1977, three years after Nixon resigned from the Presidency to a self-pitying and bitter seclusion

Frost, regarded as a flaky celebrity by the Washington press corps, managed to lever out of this superb political operator a startling admission of wrong-doing and culpability, best summed up in the quote: “When the president does it, that means it’s not illegal.”

Morgan skilfully crafts an argument (and, interestingly, makes one feel slightly nostalgic for Nixon – everything is relative) that television reduces and diminishes public office and debate. However, the play doesn’t escape its own criticisms – it too “simplifies, diminishes”.

Most of Morgan’s work is for the screen, and so it’s unsurprising that this play, even though it resists the genre of docu-drama, is very reminiscent of a dramatised television documentary – brief re-enactments of a variety of encounters, held together by an explanatory narrative delivered by one of Frost’s researchers, Jim Reston (Teague Rook).

The production is powered by a magnificent performance of Nixon by Marshall Napier, which reaches beyond caricature to glimpses of an awkward and disillusioned man, and John Adams’ performance of the charismatic Frost.

Roger Hodgman’s production is unobtrusive and elegant, using a revolve to swiftly move the action across a stage dominated by a big screen, on which the swollen faces of the actors emphasise the unreal focus of the camera.

It’s easily digestible stuff which walks an uneasy line between fiction and non-fiction. Its high dramatic point is a fictional late-night phone call between Frost and a drunk Nixon which, paradoxically, generates the most truthful moments in the play.

This review is published in today's Australian.