Some plays are mountains needing actors skilled at climbing, and David Hare’s The Vertical Hour is Mount Everest where the winds ferociously blow. Actors have to strategize to weather such conditions, and Bill Nighy, the British stage and screen actor (in his Broadway debut) does this by tackling the play head-on. Julianne Moore’s strategy is less detectable, yet Nighy won’t let her fall: He simply lifts her up.
For the brainy Hare—whose most recent work in New York was the Bush-bashing Stuff Happens—The Vertical Hour at first seems dryly polemical. Indeed, the characters breathe politics: As Nadia, Moore plays a foreign correspondent turned Yale professor who supports the Iraq war and once advised President Bush; as Oliver—father of Philip, Nadia’s fiancé—Nighy plays a British physician whose hatred of Bush’s neocon con game is as lethal as inhaled polonium. The full-blown Conservative vs. Liberal smackdown never occurs, however, for The Vertical Hour is really about Nadia’s fear of not living dangerously.
Before meeting Philip, before teaching at Yale, Nadia was in Sarajevo and then Iraq. There, she fell in love with another foreign correspondent, realizing too late that he valued the danger of the job more than the danger of their commitment. Given Nadia’s trenchant erudition (she uses phrases like “infantilized by fear”), she’s a knotty enough character for Moore to harness.
Yet in certain scenes, Moore’s like an acrophobic mountaineer. In fact, she’s positively flat in the opening scene in which she debates with a nationalistic student about political nuance (“This is not a madrassa,” she quips, referring to an Islamic religious school), and she’s equally flat in the closing scene when counseling an African-American, female student who is angrier about a ruined romance than a collision of civilizations. Then, in the three powerful middle scenes, all set outside Oliver’s home on the Welsh border, Nighy’s remarkable performance lends Moore a hand.
Perhaps Nighy has realized his character more fully. After all, Oliver knows that Philip—a successful physical therapist played with tautness and verve by Andrew Scott—has introduced him to Nadia to receive his validation. Oliver knows, too, that their strained father/son relationship is a byproduct of his lifestyle: 1960s sexual liberalism run amok. Yet despite Oliver’s cavils with her conservatism, and resisting his typical desire to seduce, Oliver nevertheless concludes that Philip is likely too conventional for her. And that, her wounds aside, she must (if you will) stay the course and promote her philosophy, not within the walls of the Ivy League, but from the front—even if its at the expense of her heart. “You can’t live your life in flight” is The Vertical Hour’s most ironic and memorable line—and uttered by the character least likely to do so.
Nighy is aggressive from the moment he’s opposite Moore. Not brutal, but aggressive. She’ll have a line—declarative, resistant, thrashing, insightful—and he’ll never let her wallow, offering his next line masterfully and forcing her to reach. Whenever she does, it’s magic. Magic, too, is how Moore looks—she’s 46 but looks about 30 (roughly Nadia’s age) and is ravishingly beautiful. Nighy is physically curious as he thrusts his hands in his pockets, slinks his lean frame into Ann Roth’s costumes or shuffles around Scott Pask’s verdant set, which Brian MacDevitt illuminates with clever stealth.
Hare’s play is his most emotionally gripping in years. He’s writing about the quagmire of Iraq and—sympathetically, penetratingly—about a woman at odds with herself: Someone who fears her love is tantamount to military withdrawal. As Nighy helps Moore reach the apex of the mountain—a process no doubt indebted to Sam Mendes’ tidy direction—the fear of the climb begins to recede. All the better to see the war.
Through Apr. 1. Music Box Theatre, 239 W. 45th St. (betw. Broadway & 8th Ave.), 212-239-6200; $76.25-$96.25.
