The Vertical Hour
By David Hair
Sydney Theatre Company
Full text version of review in today's The Daily Telegraph
David Hare has become a British institution through his scripts that take big picture politics and slam them face down into a domestic situation.
His latest play, The Vertical Hour, is no different and brings the politics of the American invasion of Iraq to a deserted part of Shropshire in west England.
Philip (Christopher Stollery) an expat Brit living in the US has brought his fiancé Nadia (Victoria Longley) an ex-foreign correspondent and now academic at Yale, across the Atlantic to visit his father Oliver (Pip Miller) in Shrewsbury.
Oliver’s inquisitive nature and Nadia’s American confidence establishes a meeting of personalities that is at once tense and strained. Oliver represents the stereotype of British sensibility who despairs at what the Americans are doing in their global politics.
When explaining to Nadia why he was so against George W Bush’s invasion into Iraq he puts it plainly – “I knew who the surgeon was going to be, so I had a fair idea what the operation would look like.”
But the debate of politics gets murkier as it is revealed that Nadia’s association with the Bush administration includes her role as an academic adviser prior to the invasion. It is this event that makes her unpopular professionally and socially.
Through showing us the characters and personalities that lead every day lives within extraordinary events playwright Hare humbles us and asks the question of his audience – what would you do if you were in this situation?
It’s a humbling question, but not quite enough to really keep you engaged for the length of the play. Potentially, Iraq and the problems around it could have been investigated more thoroughly and exposed ideas and themes that you don’t find in a feature article in a newspaper or in a documentary.
Julian Meyrick’s direction is considered, deliberate and clever with performances from a cast that deliver powerful performances. It is, however, the script that can’t travel the full length and doesn’t reach the explosive emotional finale. The stakes in this setting are just not high enough.
Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House
Until March 22 $56-77
02 9250 1777
www.sydneyoperahouse.com
Friday, 22 February 2008
Review: The Vertical Hour
Posted by Nicholas Pickard at 3:45 pm
Labels: British Plays, Review, Sydney Theatre Company, Theatre
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11 comments:
Nicholas this is one time I disagree with you. I think this is an extraordinary play, dealing with issues and human frailties with a skill and complexity far beyond any other contemporary playwright I can think of. Hare's plays don't always hit the mark, but to me this is his best play. Having seen this in NY, with, quite frankly, two stronger male actors (a transcendent performance by Bill Nighy), there was never any sense of the play falling short. I agree that in this production there were missed moments, but I assure you they exist on the page.
I also think you've missed the mark Nicholas. It's the production that's at fault here. The play requires a sexual energy that was almost entirely absent here in Sydney. The text creates deliberate space for this key part of the story, but it's a space that in Meyrick's production remains unfilled.
Ben Brantley, reviewing the Broadway production to which you refer st genisus for "The New York Times", shares Captain Pickard's (sorry, couldn't resist) less than subtle disregard for the script. While I appreciate that Mr Hare is a beacon for those of us otherwise starved of contemporary playwrights in the style of the late, great Arthur Miller, it is a mistake to pray at the Hare altar without engaging critical faculties. This is, after all, a review.
I remember an extraordinary production of a play called "Dreadnought", many many years ago in a tin shed somewhere in Melbourne. It was directed by Julian Meyrick. It was at a time when his young peer, Barry Kosky, was creating unmissable and hypnotic theatre in a dis-used auto mechanic's workshop in St Kilda.
One of the critical aspects of the role of artistic director is to align directors with plays within their both likely and unlikely sphere. I applaud Robyn Nevin's choice of play and director. But to Julian, I would say that academia is a form. A concept. You are better than this. Get out of your head boy and back to theatre that bangs you between the eyes.
Well, I think both Michael and Anon make valid points, but I'll have one more little go at defending the play itself. I read the Brantley review, and putting aside for a moment his reluctance to praise and "foreign" work (did you see his escoriating review of Niel Armfield's "Cloudstreet"?) I remember him blaming the play for stacking the deck against Nadia's (the US) argument and in favour of the Brits. Again, I think he's wrong, it was simply that Bill Nighy blew Julianne Moore off the stage so of course it seemed like he had the far more compelling argument. But to agree with something Anon says, Julianne Moore, whatever her weakness in stagecraft, had a drop-dead beauty and hunger of a sexual predator that meshed with Nighy so that when the father comes on to her it seemed perfectly logical and you believed she was the woman who screwed all the best looking correspondents in the war zones. Sadly, that was suspending disbelief a bit too much in the Sydney production...
While I can't remember the last STC production that didn't have major problems, I think your review is, if anything, too kind to the play.
My issue is this: doesn't anybody know how to dramatise their arguments any more? I am tired to exhaustion of having writers like (serial offender) Hare, who are supposed to be thoroughly experienced playwrights, lecture me instead of showing me. No wonder Generation Y are all steeped in dance and performance art, when the contemporary theatre they're offered as an alternative is nothing but words.
I didn't find the words in this especially exciting (there was certainly nothing new on the Wests's involvement in the middle-East) but even if the arguments had been critical and well made, and even if the production was lacking, this is still a brutally undramatic play. The major tension is over whether they'll run out of pinot before they've put each other to sleep.
Those who claim it was better in London appear to be suggesting that in fact Hare's basic argument, when well directed, is "If a woman is sexy enough, should we forgive her for advising George Bush to enter Iraq? Because obviously, if she's not sexy there's no excuse." This interpretation makes the play offensive as well as boring for women, but perhaps it is the kind of thing men gravely ponder when they read the international pages of the NY Times. If so, there's a great comedy lurking there, but Hare hasn't written that either.
Also, am I dumb or is the title a complete red herring that's only there to sound intriguing?
Finally, they were in Shrewsbury the other night on that British TV show where they do architectural digs. They all pronounced it "Shrovesbury". Why doesn't STC?
It would seem that the vertical hour is the only amount of time that these characters spend not being/wanting to be/needing to be/trying to be/etc., horizontal (ie fucking).
Hang on Monica, let's just back the truck up for a moment...I don't see anyone suggesting that if a woman is sexy enough she should be forgiven for supporting George Bush...I think it's more a case of the actress offering a credible depiction of the character as described in the play. When someone is described as the most beautiful woman at Yale University (a campus with 4000 women), a war correspondent with long history of male admirers, and whose current fiance feels insecure about holding on to her because she is so much more charismatic and attractive than any woman he has ever known, then the credibility of the character is going to be affected if the person on stage doesn't convince us of this. I don't think there's a patriarchal conspiracy afoot here, just a wish to see the play (any play-whatever its strengths or weaknesses) performed as convincingly as possible.
As far as all those damned words, well, somehow they didn't alienate the audiences of Miller, Odets, Pinter, Osborne or a lot of others in the past, and today Katherine Thompson and Joanna Murray Smith are writing some of the most verbose characters we see on stage...whatever that means.
Don't get me wrong: I'm all for directors obeying the script. I'm constantly whingeing about how Benedict Andrews never seems to read the plays he's directing ("I love these old houses", says Honey dubiously, eyeing off the plexiglass walls and black granite floors of the set).
However, I was trying to determine what Hare's actual argument is, and what Nadia's sexiness has to do with it. Either the argument hangs on it and is something like what I said, or it's immaterial and people are just annoyed they didn't have better crumpet to watch.
I don't object at all to wordy playwrights: bring on Shakespeare, Stoppard and Wilde anytime you like. That huge monologue at the beginning of Gow's Toy Symphony was worth the price of admission on its own. What I object to is being lectured in the theatre. If there is a plot, and it offsets the words and appears to be their wellspring, then (assuming the central ideas are interesting) most likely I'm happy. Miller and Osborne - in their heyday - were perfectly fine in this regard. The Crucible is a justifiably famous example of a play that dramatises an argument no-one dared put.
I plead pardon for poor Pinter, who is among the stingiest playwrights in history when it comes to words! Everything that happens in his plays happens between the words, not in them.
I do have, big-time, the same problem with Joanna Murray-Smith that I have with this play. Katherine Thomson isn't a great dramatist, but she doesn't just stand still and lecture.
If other people like this style of theatre I'm cool with that. I just think you're in the minority. I seriously do worry that the flight from word-based theatre comes of the abandonment of dramatisation (a good story that means something beyond itself) in favour of Worthy Argument. The paucity of really good interpretative directors is part of the problem, I do agree with that, but the basis of it is in the dramaturgy.
Beautifully put Monica, and food for thought. Thank you for your considered reply. By the way, on your previous query about the meaning of the title--here's my highly expendable theory--we're told the "vertical hour" in a combat zone is the brief period in which it is actually possible to save someone who is gravely injured. I think the conversation in the middle of the night in this play is Nadia's vertical hour, in the eyes of the father. He sees her as someone who has abandoned the one thing she cared passionately about:"telling the truth and staying with them to the end", something they share, in her case as a journo in combat, in his case as a doctor. He is trying to have her come to the realisation that marriage to his son would cripple her permanently, she would grow to hate it, and herself, for such a retreat from her true calling. Thus the son is right--his father is trying to break them up, but not for his own gratification but to intervene in the nick of time and save her soul before it dies.
Michael, Dreadnought was performed in a corrugated iron cargo shed at the Polly Woodside Maritime Museum. It was a kickhouse theatre production for La Mama, fifteen years ago this month. I wouldn't have said it was one of Julian's best productions, by a long shot, but he was certainly one of the most intellectually brilliant directors working at the time. Not bookish, but informed, thoughtful and visionary.
monica - in response to the pronunciation of Shresbury... it is on the Welsh border, and as such, is pronounced "Shrovesbury" by those with a Welsh accent and "Shrewsbury" by those with an English accent... hence the STC pronunciation...
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