The Vertical Hour
The Vertical Hour, Sydney Theatre Company at the Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House; February 14-March 22; ph: (02) 9250 1777 or www.sydneytheatre.com.au
The central wrangle between Nadia (Victoria Longley) and Oliver (Pip Miller), father of her fiancé, the jock-ish Philip (Christopher Stollery), is characterised by one of the play’s many sharply comedic exchanges: "I knew who the surgeon was going to be, so I had a fair idea what the operation would look like," says the world-weary English county GP to his visitor, a former-TV war correspondent.
He’s talking about the Iraq war and Nadia is inevitably going to be the patsy in any exchange on the subject. She is American, now an academic (International Relations at Yale) and represents those liberals who were in favour of the invasion - “the liberation” – of Iraq. Her views on the war and the US make her an easy target for cheap, knowing laughs from an Australian audience for whom sneering at the Bush administration’s staggering ineptitude is a given. As she points out to Oliver, however, unlike his countrymen (and you can add Australia to the UK in this instance) she and hers can and do distinguish between the officeholder and the office. That's why she took up the presidential invitation to visit the Oval Office to give expert advice.
It’s one of the more interesting exchanges in a play that is at times a rather jumbled grab-bag of ideologies, arguments and positions (all vertical, none horizontal, despite the whiff of erotic naughtiness implied by their tete-a-tete in jarmies in Oliver’s midsummer night’s garden).
Because The Vertical Hour follows in the footsteps, in Sydney at least, of a hugely successful production of David Hare’s last play, Stuff Happens, it is inevitably seen in that light: “an Iraq play”, but it’s not. Where Stuff Happens was a cheeky and ambitious drama-doco of the events which led to the calamity in Baghdad, that featured the full panoply of main players (Bush, Condi, Powell, Blair and so on) and made global politics personal, The Vertical Hour is about personal politics. In The Vertical Hour the argument about Iraq is the catalyst rather than its core and its chief protagonists are the trio of girlfriend, lover, lover’s father.
In the hands of two actors as accomplished and intelligent as Miller and Longley, the relationship that develops between the two over a fractured weekend at his rural Shropshire home, is always engaging. Longley, in particular, takes a journey that is difficult, sometimes verges on implausible and is portrayed in a discursive, low-key style that must be exhausting (melodramatics are so much more energising). Nevertheless, the calm, analytical frontline witness is a heartbeat from a swift collapse into raw, emotional truth-telling when Oliver, the subtle seducer, almost casually cracks the façade. It happens with an observation of awesome and realistic triteness: she is a woman who has suffered pain and heartbreak.
Well yes, who hasn’t? But few have to deal at the same time and publicly with events of brutality in such places as Kosovo, Bosnia and, of course, Iraq. In the face of that, all personal considerations and emotions are set aside and buried. More than that, Nadia made a decision to deal with the source of the personal pain by choosing another course. Rather than a life of danger, adrenaline, peculiar glamour and fulfillment, and a lover who cared more for the next war zone than he ever would for her, she turned her back and walked.
Instead, she has chosen to observe and commentate from the comfort of a book-lined study in New Haven, Connecticut; and to share her bed with a decent, dull, physical therapist expatriate Englishman. It’s surely the sudden harsh spotlight Oliver shines on all this that causes her collapse into wracking sobs. If some comments are anything to go by, however, it might be women who would empathise and understand her plight rather than the decent dullards who just don’t get it.
That said, while The Vertical Hour is engaging and occasionally provocative, it is also curiously constructed. It's topped and tailed by portentous interactions with students who would have been given a clip round the ear and sent on their way in less litigious times. And, in this luxurious production for the Sydney Theatre Company, another curiosity emerges: the placing of it in the Drama Theatre. The setting consists of an extraneous revolve, multiple set changes and a weird semi-mirrored backdrop that evokes neither Shropshire nor Iraq.
The Vertical Hour is an intimate play of tiny moments and tinier dramas that require an almost musical continuo to maintain the flow of ideas and interactions. It would have been ideally suited to Wharf 1 or the Playhouse, could have been a happy if not financially viable experience in Wharf 2 and is all but ruined by the vast expanses of the Drama theatre.
With one or other of the actors leaving and entering the stage with some frequency, the passage to and from the wings to the central playing circle is a hike, for actors and audience. And it’s made even more difficult because the stupid mirrored wall across the width of the rear stage area signals every move and adds to the time lag and loss of focus.
Oliver and Nadia share interesting, thought-provoking and amusing exchanges. He reminds her that Richard Nixon said of the Great Wall of China simply: “it is a great wall.” Perhaps designer Stephen Curtis took him literally, it’s difficult to work out why else he lumbers the production with it.
In the end, however, the effortless efforts of Longley and Miller prevail in a play ostensibly about war, “the ancient hatreds” that both have observed and despised, but which actually depicts that other even more ancient hatred that remains unacknowledged and unspoken: the one between clever powerful man and clever powerful woman.
The production was uneasy on opening night – hopefully because of the above mentioned mechanical difficulties. If the actors can overcome these, The Vertical Hour is a play that dares you to think about relationships, choices and easy answers – the latter being the most dangerous choice of all.
