The Hour Draws Nighy

The Vertical Hour is supposedly a reference to the period immediately after a physical trauma when medical intervention can prove most beneficial. However I haven't been able to find any reference to this on line, so maybe he just made it up? I can't see how this fits into the play itself either. One of the defining incidents relates to an accident that Bill Nighy's character had some years before; his lover was killed, when a car he was driving was involved in an accident. It is this event which finally ended his marriage, and caused him to give up his senior surgeons post and become a country GP, but how any 'immediate intervention' relates to this accident is somewhat obscure. Nighy is absolutely superb, totally in command, able to exercise his immaculate comic timing on the best lines in the play. He also convincingly conveys anger and disgust when reciting the litany of US deficiencies in their handling of the Iraq war. It is the war that is the central theme of the play, but somehow gets hidden away for most of the time, as though Hare is determined not to go for out and out polemic, and tries (and indeed succeeds) to create a believable dysfunctional family dynamic to weave around the political arguments between Nighy and Julianne Moore's war correspondent turned academic Iraq apologist.

Moore is disappointing, her voice lacks the range required for stage acting, and without the close ups, and audio boosting facilities of cinema lacks sufficient presence to match Nighy. The set is very simple, rough floor boards cover the stage and a large Oak tree in the background provides shade for a long dining table, and a motley assortment of chairs. It was remarkably evocative, and made me yearn to have a garden that could accommodate such a tree, and a desire to sit out under it on long summer nights and enjoy sumptuous many coursed feasts.Aaah! The play reminded my very much of Rock'n'Roll with it's interweaving of the personal and the political, and it's constant flow of ideas and observations, it's another play about 'everything', but the musical introductions to each scene (Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Nick Drake) seemed to echo R'n'R a little too closely.

At the end of the day Hare is obviously opposed to Iraq, but he doesn't seem to be able to say anything very clear about what the alternatives may have been, or what should be done now. Moore's final decision to quit academia and return to reporting in Iraq doesn't seem a to be a very clear statement about anything either, and adds to the general confusion.