The title of David Hare’s 2006 play refers to the time after a battle when a doctor can be of some use to the wounded. However, his play takes place not in some war-ravaged village in Iraq but in the peace and quiet of a seminar room at Yale University and in a remote house in rural Shropshire.

The play begins and ends in the seminar room where Nadia, a former war correspondent in Bosnia and Iraq and now a liberal academic and supporter of the Iraq invasion, has to deal with two students (Hadleigh Walker & Tansy Hayden) who represent the twin poles of Hare’s thesis concerning political involvement and one’s personal emotional life.

This discursive play is not just about Iraq. It is about many things: a Freudian struggle between father and disapproving son, sexual attraction, British and American democracy, British cynicism versus American idealism, medical ethics, and drawn out revelations of emotionally scarring events.

The central scenes take place in the Shropshire home of Oliver, a doctor and father of the American based physiotherapist Phillip who has brought Nadia for a brief holiday to meet him. Phillip soon believes his philandering dad, who made his mother’s life a misery, is out to seduce Nadia. The only tension that arises in this wordy play is he or isn’t he up to his old tricks.

For the rest of the time debate takes over, some of it fascinating and some of its tediousness relieved by the occasional good line such as Oliver’s about President Bush’s invasion of Iraq: "I knew who the surgeon was going to be, so I had a fair idea what the operation would look like."

Jane Waddell’s unfussy production serves the play well, as does Andrew Foster’s marvelous setting and she gets smooth performances from her cast though Peter Hayden’s Oliver could be a little more acidly condescending. Aaron Alexander does what he can with the nebulous role of Phillip and Jodie Rimmer is totally believable as an ex-war correspondent conveying the forcefulness and drive of someone like CNN’s Christian Amanpour.
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"In combat medicine," David Hare’s ex war correspondent turned academic, Nadia, tells us, in the penultimate scene of his play, "there’s this moment – after a disaster, after a shooting – there’s this moment, the vertical hour, when you can actually be of some use." (In emergency medicine it’s known as The Golden Hour.)

It seems fair, then, to ask whether this two-and-a-quarter hour play (plus interval) is of any use when it comes to helping us grapple with terrorism in general and the Iraq question in particular. I want it to be. I want to come out knowing more than when I went in; to have my preconceptions challenged and my understanding of what makes humans do as they do broadened and deepened. Something like that.

I cannot say that Hare’s series of sedentary conversations conducted in the Shrewsbury, Shropshire countryside, book-ended by Nadia’s meetings in her Yale University study with American international politics students about their essays, does it for me. Certainly there is plenty of personal drama churning within the largely political discourse … but I have yet to get the allegorical relevance of these personal stories to the bigger political picture.

Presumably it is significant that Nadia’s name is close to nadir, meaning ‘low point’ and derived from the Arabic ‘nazir’ meaning opposite to the zenith, but I don’t really get that either. Except the attracting and repelling of opposites – in academic rigour, political ideologies, religions, sexual attraction and war – does permeate all aspects of the play.

It’s tempting to say The Vertical Hour is a radio play but Andrew Foster’s dodecagon (12-sided) rostrum set against a large curved screen featuring (in the Shrewsbury scenes) an almost three-dimensional projection of a spreading oak(?) tree, wondrously enhanced by Ulli Briese’s lighting effects – evoking sunset, stars and sunrise – is pleasing to look at. And the Jane Waddell-directed production does manifest some subtext to be observed in the characters’ behaviours.

In a brief prologue Peter Hayden, whose character turns out to be Oliver – an ex-nephrologist (kidney specialist) turned general practitioner – speaks to us, the audience, of accidents; of signalling left when you intend to go right (political parallel intended, no doubt). This is a set up for a revelation much later which explores responsibility, guilt and shame in the context of an accident that was not his fault although it did expose his private activities and radically change his life.

The opening scene finds Jodie Rimmer’s rigorous lecturer trying to impress upon Hadleigh Walker’s closed-minded daddy’s boy Dennis the importance of having an open mind when it comes to academic enquiry. She defines politics as attempting to reconcile the irreconcilable while he sees its sole function as allowing people to live their own lives, by which he really means letting the rich and privileged continue to exploit the poor. And yet he is not un-complex in his response to Nadia, who represents the opposite to the predicable security of his prospects. Thus the agenda is set.

In the rolling downs of Shropshire – the garden, we imagine, of the comfortable home where Oliver dwells alone with his insomnia and non-fiction books – his son Phillip (Aaron Alexander) is paying a rare visit, with his new girlfriend, Nadia. Surprisingly she is an apologist for the American invasion of Iraq, to which Oliver is opposed. But Oliver’s notion of freedom is rooted in the ‘open marriage’ he had with Pauline – a relationship that started when both of them were medical students in the 1960s – and Phillip blames him for ruining his mother’s life. 

Nadir has also argued that terrorism could be "the wrong answer to the right question"; she does have an open mind. And she is not averse to a rigorous argument about such things as whether her summons to the White House to advise the president means she was contributing something or being used. I assume these debates are not easy for Phillip to handle, given he grew up attempting to be the peacemaker between his constantly fighting parents but this is not very apparent in the non-verbal behaviours.

The questions of whether Oliver is trying to seduce Nadia and whether she is attracted to him are more effectively present in the subtext … but I still cannot make the connection between all this and the ways the US and UK have dealt with Iraq. Sure, both scenarios are pretty convoluted and complicated, and who can say who is totally right and who is totally wrong? It’s just that this dramatisation – or is it this production of it? – doesn’t excite my interest.

The initial impression, at the second (Sunday matinee) performance, is the actors are more focused on getting their accents right than inhabiting their characters. This soon passes as the intelligence of their understanding of their characters becomes apparent, yet rather declamatory deliveries of the positions for which they are mouthpieces still inhibit my capacity to empathise with them as fellow humans. It is a big challenge for actors to draw Hare’s political discourse into the realm of real-world relationships but the means for doing so is in the script and this production has not yet made a good marriage of those opposites.

As Rimmer navigates Nadia’s emotional journey and clearly articulates her strong opinions, I can accept the validity of the ‘loud American’ touch in frustrated dialogue with her students, and in meeting and jousting with Oliver. But with front line experience in war zones she must also know how to keep the volume down and a role this size does require more modulation.

The play’s ‘vertical hour’ is just before dawn, when Nadia and Oliver bare their souls while Phillip sleeps. I can only be bewildered that the opportunity is not taken here for her to be softer, for pragmatic reasons, and so enhance our interest in whether there is more to their apparent intimacy than the confessional sharing of secrets.  

Peter Hayden’s dispassionate suaveness irritates me at first until Phillip cites it as one of his faults. His charm becomes very effective, dramatically. But I’m blessed if I know why Hare has chosen to pit his front-line war correspondent against an insufferably complacent armchair critic like Oliver. 

Phillip – a physiotherapist-cum-personal trainer who is also good at fixing inanimate things – is the character I feel I should relate to most strongly, as representing the ordinary person perplexed at the persistence of wars and wanting to be more useful in stopping them. Again Alexander navigates well and articulates clearly but I am more conscious of his acting than I am empathetic to his character, which makes my wondering if he is the innocent victim here or the author of his own destiny more of an arms-length academic exercise that it needs to be.

The resolution to the personal stories is revealed in Nadia’s second confrontation with a student. Tansy Hayden’s excellently distilled grumpy southern belle Terri, has taken a nihilistic approach in her essay on Iraq and what motivates President Bush to go to war. She is also emotionally shattered vis-à-vis a boyfriend, in whom she had vested everything security-wise …

It is in this context that we discover what Nadia has decided to do, which is presumably designed to get us arguing afterwards as to the rights and wrongs of it all. For example, is she more use at Yale, waking students up to dimensions of truth beyond their complacent conditioning (Dennis) or emotional dependencies (Terri) or back on the war zone trying to explain the inexplicable?

Perhaps the most important way the themes are discussed, or manifested dramatically, is around the notion of love. And heroism. Without being too specific as to their places in the story, I have to say I do not regard a war correspondent who dives into the fray with reckless disregard for his own safety, then drinks the nights away, as heroic.

The question of whether a woman’s attraction to such a man is ‘true love’ or escapism; thrill-seeking or immersion in the vital aspects of life may well be germane to the play’s core purpose. But while it is interesting, I remain neither gripped by their dilemmas and nor enlightened as to the relevance of all this stuff to the morality and dynamics of the war in Iraq.  

On departing Circa I recall another play on Iraq: Dean Parker’s Baghdad Baby!, which premiered at Bats in 2005. For my money it is an infinitely better exploration of the same questions and issues, and more deserving of a season on Broadway, which is where The Vertical Hour premiered. My National Business Review coverage of it is appended below for comparison.
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National Business Review / Arts – 12 August, 2005
Baghdad, Baby!
by Dean Parker
directed by Jean Betts
at Bats, Wellington
until 20 August 2005
reviewed by John Smythe

Creative riches in Baghdad play

Dean Parker’s ingenious take on occupied Iraq, post Saddam but pre ‘liberation’, is in turn insightful, humorous, sardonic, heart-warming, heart-rending and spine chilling. His detailed programme notes about where he sourced the content of key speeches proves that good research can lead to extraordinary creative riches.

In a bead-curtained Baghdad Café, splendidly manifested at Bats by Joe Bleakley and lit by Jennifer Lal, the seductively dancing hostess, Shirin Saifi (Ban Abdul) greets her guests: "Welcome to Baghdad, old Mesopotamia! Before Rome, before Greece, before Egypt … The invention of writing; the calculation of pi to two decimal places: the cradle of civilization!"

This might be the setting for a latter day Graham Greene or Somerset Maugham novel. The cafe’s regulars are a soldier, businessman, journalist, back-packer and a local incumbent. Two of them are innocents abroad, one obviously, the other surprisingly so.

Kyle (Charlie Bleakley), a backpacker from Napier ("Go you Magpies!") on his OE, is either a naïve young fool for going where everyone including Lonely Planet says don’t, or an heroic traveller who truly values the land’s great history and simply refuses to be cowed by fear.

Cigar-sucking Lieutenant Kilroy (Matthew Saville) from Lincoln Arkansas ("We are your war-mongering bigot") truly believes he is in Iraq to liberate a "decent people" from tyranny. He is genuinely offended when Martha McCartney (Kate Prior), a CNN reporter, swears in front of Shirin. And in response to the TV footage of planes flying into the Twin Towers on September 11 2001, he admits to feeling a certain exhilaration: "At last! A war to the finish between everything we love and everything we hate! Fine! Bring it on!"

The highly articulate Martha’s pragmatic approach to keeping her job with CNN despite increasing disquiet at what she witnesses is offset by her desire for love and a happy life with Harry Zinc (Andrew Smith). He is a Kiwi business man subcontracted by Kellogg Brown & Root (parent company, Halliburton) to supply reconstructive goods and services. In a past life Harry was a promising poet but lost his faith. A projected laptop sequence sees him edit a new poem to oblivion. Now his only purpose in life is to buy low and sell high.

Shirin too has lost any faith she might have had in God. She secures her survival with expedient flair and panache, reserving true passion for exchanges with Amir (Michael Wilson), an opportunistic anti-occupation activist who believes in the need for a strong leader, still prays like a good Muslim and speaks little English. A device where the two Iraqis use ordinary Kiwi voices to converse in their own language, while Shirin’s English has a more studied accent, works superbly.

By making all his characters self-justified, fallible and surprising, Parker puts the simplistic propaganda of all political factions into perspective. Nevertheless an ideological confrontation between Martha and Kilroy is powerful theatre. "Where’s the democracy in a free market conducted at gunpoint?" she wants to know. "Is George Bush the whore of Babylon?"

Kilroy’s response makes a crucial point: "You live in what we call a reality-based community. We create reality so you are always one step behind."

A party game where someone is challenged to "work out what you think we think your worst nightmare is" is also employed to good effect. For me what is most scary is the crackling radio communications between US combatants as they try to make sense of what, to them, is very foreign. The way they despatch Amir captures exactly why justice can never prevail in this cross-purposed war fuelled by fear of the unknown and fanaticism.

The play does hit one false note when both Shirin and Martha become distraught at the thought that Kyle has been shot. While his innocence is very engaging, the script and/or production need to invest more in his emotional impact on both women for their responses to ring true amid all the other stuff that’s happening.

This may well be resolved by now. Likewise I trust a couple of the actors have now got the pitch of the theatre and are more authentically engaging each other and their audience.

Director Jean Betts must be applauded for bringing this highly relevant and ambitious new work to the stage. May it be given the space to develop to its full potential then play in theatres throughout the country.
ENDS

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