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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
"The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it," Oscar Wilde said. The British screenwriter and playwright Peter Morgan--responsible for the 2006 movie "The Queen" and for the play "Frost/Nixon," now on Broadway (at the Bernard B. Jacobs)--agrees. His stories, he says, "take defining moments in recent history and allow drama to explore areas that have perhaps been neglected." These areas have included the royal family's response to the death of Diana ("The Queen"), the rise of the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin (the 2006 film "The Last King of Scotland," which Morgan co-wrote with Jeremy Brock), the power-sharing agreement made between Prime Minister-to-be Tony Blair and his future Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown (in a 2003 Channel 4 TV movie called "The Deal"), the prison reformer Lord Longford's attempt to win a pardon for the child-murderer Myra Hindley (in another Channel 4 TV movie, titled "Longford," and recently aired on HBO), and the combative interview between former President Richard Nixon and the British talk-show pundit David Frost ("Frost/Nixon").
Over the past five years, Morgan, who is forty-four, has become a brand name. He owns the franchise on a certain kind of scrupulously researched and astutely observed investigation into the emotional ructions behind contemporary events--neither documentary nor fiction but an imaginative amalgam of the two. Since his Academy Award nomination for "The Queen," which has grossed more than a hundred million dollars, Morgan has been inundated with scripts. "None of them interest me, because they're all fact-based," he told me. What interests him is narratives in which real public figures are thrown into unlikely relationships. His dramas turn on what he has called "this odd collection of pas de deux--dances between very different kinds of people." "I want to go to all the un-minuted places--bedrooms, Land-Rovers, private audiences," he told ABC News this year. To me he said, "I couldn't begin to write unless I could see heartbreak or human connection. I have a great deal of compassion for those in public life and what we have done to them."
As a storyteller, Morgan is drawn to volatile, ambitious antagonists. ("Ambition interests me because it's such a surefire indicator of damage," he said.) In "The Deal," a drama, directed by Stephen Frears--who also directed "The Queen"--about Tony Blair's pivotal meeting with Gordon Brown, in 1994 at a North London restaurant, where they decided on the future of the Labour Party leadership (a meeting whose ramifications are still playing out in British politics), Morgan hit on a rich, intellectually challenging seam of psychological and political combat. "I actually wrote about a sort of fratricide," he said. "That's what interested me: friendship and betrayal." In one scene, in which the up-and-coming politicians are walking out of the House of Commons, competition and exposition play off each other deftly, as the passive-aggressive Blair teases the saturnine front-runner Brown, asking him if his reticence is a "specifically Scottish trait":
GORDON: You ask this, as a Scot yourself, of course., TONY: You may mock, but I am a Scot., GORDON: As well as being black, and working-class., TONY: I was born in Scotland., GORDON: Being born in a stable doesn't make you a horse.
The chemistry of opposition makes terrific drama. Morgan insists on this point. "They tried to get me to write about the Queen without Tony Blair," he recalled of his producers on "The Queen." "What happened after Diana's death was quite interesting, and it was about Blair and the Queen. They said, 'For God's sake, don't go anywhere near Blair.' So I started trying to write it without Blair in it. I just couldn't. It wasn't interesting to me. I called Stephen up and said, 'The only way this is interesting is with Blair and the Queen in conflict--it's sort of mothers and sons, two different generations in two different worlds, two different Englands, two different languages.' And he got that immediately." Frears said, "His friends in London are quite grand, so he's writing precisely about things that he's observed." (Morgan married Lila Schwarzenberg, an Austrian, in 1997; they and their four children live in London.)
Much of Morgan's storytelling is anchored in warring dualities. "The Last King of Scotland," in which a young, adventurous Scot becomes the personal physician to Idi Amin...
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