Nadia (Indira Varma) and Philip (Tom Riley) visit the old country. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
Half an hour into David Hare's The Vertical Hour, one character, a male English doctor, informs another, a female American academic, that, contrary to what she may suppose, he does have feelings for Britain. "I do have a button marked 'patriotism'," he says, wryly. "But - let's say - I'm choosy about who I allow to press it." That thought stuck in my head for the remaining two hours of the play because it made me realise something I hadn't quite come to before: my button is marked "Iraq" and I'm extraordinarily touchy about anyone who comes near it.
Many of the critics who've so far written about The Vertical Hour saw it in New York just over a year ago, and most agree that compared with its Broadway staging, the Royal Court production concentrates far less on the aspects of the play which dissect the Iraq invasion and its aftermath and far more on the tangled relationships that lie at its heart. I didn't see it in New York, but I'd go much further: The Vertical Hour isn't about Iraq it all, and only some clumsy soldering on Hare's part, plus a good deal of critical groupthink, make anyone believe it is.
The story concerns a youngish couple: Nadia, an American professor of international relations, and her new boyfriend, Philip, an English emigré who runs a successful chain of health clinics in the States. They're back in the old country to visit his father, Oliver, Anton Lesser's spry but gimlet-eyed, constructedly curmudgeonly GP - ostensibly to ask for his blessing, more realistically for father and son to pick over the bones of their past. Maybe it's the presence of the doctor, obscurely burdened yet secretly ennobled by the elemental mysteries of his profession, but I thought of Chekhov. Particularly so in the second act, a beautifully constructed duet between Oliver and Nadia, nicely balanced between mutual confessional and interrogation. It takes place during a sleepless night outside on the lawn, the revelations colouring everything with a pallor ironically counterpoised to the dawn sun creeping up over Shropshire.
Beautifully constructed, that is, until the dialogue hits the Middle East, when it begins to wobble like an Ikea coffee table. The first mention of the word "Iraq" happened 26 minutes in; and each time the play returned to it I found myself stealing glances at my watch. We heard arguments, eloquent enough, about humane intervention versus liberal quietism, about imperialist might against international consensus. We were reminded of capitalist skulduggery, cack-handed planning, got-up intelligence. Bosnia was, via a plot device so brassily obvious it should have been given a chatshow, crammed in. So too was Shock and Awe. Halliburton. Waterboarding.
Eloquent enough, but also not nearly enough. None of it convinced me. Or perhaps more accurately I found myself unmoved by Hare's insinuation that our desires and emotions only acquire validity when aligned with what fills newspapers or scrolls past on Sky News. Why, I found myself asking (out loud, too: apologies to my very nice but long-suffering neighbour in the stalls), did this play need this skimpiest of political lean-tos to seem substantial? Why wasn't it enough to look, humanely and with intelligence, at people and the way they behave? Why did someone keep prodding at my Iraq button, and so ham-fistedly too?
Of course I'm taking a dramatist to task for not writing the play I wanted to see, but part of me wondered what, or who, persuaded David Hare this was the play he wanted to write. Do go and watch The Vertical Hour if you can, but keep this dark secret to yourselves: it's in denial. While it will reveal much about what moves people, it will tell you nothing you haven't heard, to steal a phrase, a million times about Iraq.
