The Vertical Hour

Ever since Katherine Hepburn flopped in the 1933 Broadway show, THE LAKE, rumors of disaster have been hitched to Hollywood stars on their Broadway debut. More recently Julia Roberts in THREE DAYS OF RAIN and currently Julianne Moore in THE VERITCAL HOUR have been blasted, ridiculed and diminished. And while Ms. Moore in this case lacks artistic definition as a stage actor, she is a far cry from the merely glam. But leave it to the journalists whose business is celebrity culture, so it’s all just fodder for their tirades.

 So what does that have to do with David Hare’s new play THE VERTICAL HOUR in which Julianne Moore portrays a front line TV reporter, who, having recoiled from the war zone, teaches political science at Yale? Sure, she’s no Christiane Amanpour. That reporter knows what she’s talking about and she goes about it with a decisive air. But it’s hard to figure out what Hare is addressing in THE VERTICAL HOUR, so if Ms. Moore’s portrayal waffles, well, so does this opaque tale.

Part love triangle and part political diatribe, Nadia Blye (that’s Moore), travels to the English countryside with her boyfriend to meet his father, a brilliant albeit cynical doctor. Old father son conflicts emerge, as does a powerful alliance between the father and the young woman Blye. But the moral here has less to do with good intentions versus evil ones than with abstract parallels between the art of love and the nature of patriotism. As the father says, “you can feel it, but you can’t demand it.”

And the very nature of their irreconcilable relationships also characterizes political differences. As David Hare expresses it, his play is about the conflict between the American can do attitude and the British cynicism as embodied by the two main characters. But as staged by Sam Mendes that hardly explains their entanglement or the son’s estrangement. That THE VERTICAL HOUR actually catapults us into intrigue is the single handed work of Bill Nighy who plays the father, Oliver. A gregarious, eloquent conversationalist, Nighy delights us with the oddest physical gesture, whether it’s shaking his thigh while Julianne Moore tries to engage him or pointing his middle fingers like two pistols. At times his brooding presence brings to mind Johnny Cash and at others he acts like a quirky owl turning a staccato phrase into a melodious ballad. As his son, Andrew Scott demonstrates a remarkable command of rhetoric, as only British actors can.

The setting, too, is remarkable. A large dining table set in an open landscape, reminiscent of that beautiful breakfast scene in OUT OF AFRICA. But that was a movie about people who loved each other and their country. In THE VERTICAL HOUR love is a difficult idea that’s often confused with polemics.

That’s This Week on Broadway. I’m Isa Goldberg.