He faced impeachment on, among other charges, obstruction of justice, and a transcript had been made public in which he had done just that. On 7 August, the evening before he resigned, Nixon summoned his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, to the White House for a three-hour talk. In half that time, Lees’ play shows us what they might have said.
Charles Towers’ production is set in the Lincoln Sitting Room (not, as the programme says, “the smallest room in the White House” – holding meetings there was LBJ’s style). Amid the glum Victorian furniture, Nixon squirms on his Barcalounger beneath a bust of Honest Abe, who, he says was another “regular guy caught in a very difficult time”. But the great irony of Nixon is that being an ordinary bloke was, for him, even more remote a dream than the Presidency.Keith Jochim doesn’t look much like Nixon, but those familiar, gorilla-like mannerisms – the raised arm slicing backward, the hunched shoulders and lowered head – make for a plausible impersonation. This was a man who lost the highest office by acting like the cornered rat he felt himself to be.Tim Donoghue reproduces Kissinger’s Dr Strangelove voice all too accurately (those not familiar with the original may find it caricatured). But it emphasises the joke of these two defective self-made men ruling the US.

Nixon says that he and Brezhnev, reared in poverty, “have succeeded in being…” Kissinger interrupts: “Middle class.” Unoffended, Nixon continues: “…the most powerful men in the world.” Nixon sinks into self-pity, then hauls himself out by comparing himself with Napoleon. He broods about his place in history, and seethes with hatred over rich, smug Jack Kennedy who stole from him an election he regrets not having contested. Desperate to save himself, he concocts a wild scheme to foment, on the Russo-Chinese border, a war that only he can end. This is more believable than his and Kissinger’s rushing about excitedly waving their arms; the tricky lighting also disrupts the otherwise realistic atmosphere.But Lees also undermines himself by altering what we know of this meeting – Kissinger has revealed that, at Nixon’s request, he knelt with him in prayer – to comply with one of his excellent but over-extended jokes. This strikes a false note of contrivance in an otherwise sympathetic portrait of a monster trying, with touching bewilderment, to be human.To 15 September, 020-7369 1731.

The Irish poet John Montague has led a rich life and known many interesting people This memoir is devoted to a number of them. The subtitle, “a chosen life”, echoes his 1967 collection, A Chosen Light. In both titles, the adjective places emphasis on freedom of choice – something especially important to an author whose childhood, even more than most people’s, was deficient in this quality.Montague, born in Brooklyn in 1929, was dispatched at the age of four to his father’s sisters in Co Tyrone to receive a rural upbringing. For six years he suffered the repressive atmosphere of St Patrick’s College, Armagh (recreated in 1993 in a pungent sequence of poems, Time in Armagh). After this, he understandably relished the power to decide things for himself and gravitate towards people and places he found congenial, from the unrefurbished glamour of 1950s Dublin to the spicier surroundings of 11 Rue Daguerre in Paris.
Company celebrates good company wherever it is found, whether in Dublin at McDaid’s or the Mount Street offices of Liam Miller’s Dolmen Press, the Paris quartier that sheltered Samuel Beckett or the American West Coast of Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder.The time sequence of the book is a bit confused, jumping backwards and forwards, as memory does. You can work out that Montague was back in Dublin briefly before 1953 (since Maud Gonne was still alive), when he met Mrs Yeats, the poet’s window, whose oomph impressed him. Women do not loom large, but we see Doris Lessing looking askance at Dublin intemperance, while Olivia Manning berates Beckett at a Paris reception.And Montague’s first wife, Madeleine, makes a good-humoured presence in the background.

A young Frenchwoman of exalted lineage, whom he met in Iowa and married in Normandy, she seems to have exuded a wry tolerance in the face of all the alcoholic antics, elated backbiting and literary skirmishes around her. The “roar from the pubs”, just beginning to drown out the staider murmurs of an earlier Dublin, was augmented by one raised voice in particular: that of Brendan Behan.Part of Montague’s purpose is to rescue his Herbert Street neighbour and friend from the sottish persona imposed on him later. This version captures “trilingual bisexual” former house-painter Behan in his gaily anarchic days, before booze and befuddlement had done their worst. Boisterous Behan, austere Austin Clarke and cantankerous Patrick Kavanagh are here, along with early Dolmen poets such as Thomas Kinsella.Poetry was making a comeback, a process in which the young John Montague had a large part to play. He isn’t joking, he has said elsewhere, when he describes himself as “the missing link” – that is, the first major poet of Ulster Catholic background to emerge between the death of Cathal Buidhe MacGiolla Ghunna in 1756 and the advent of Seamus Heaney (10 years Montague’s junior).No wonder that one of his most resonant poems proclaims: “All around, shards of a lost tradition” – some of which shards reside in the Gaelic place-names of Co Tyrone.