THEATER - "The Vertical Hour"

David Hare’s new play The Vertical Hour is too smart. Not that there aren’t stupid lines, but it’s a stuffy production, a lesser version of the straight-laced, upper-crust intellect of recent British imports like The History Boys and The Coast of Utopia. Bill Nighy’s character may be up to task with the dry wits and lively personalities of Simon Russell Beale and Richard Griffiths, and Dan Bittner is surprisingly charming in his role as a melancholy snob, but the show, which attempts to politicize the war in Iraq from the sidelines of a quiet lawn on the Welsh borders and the safety of a Yale University office, falls as flat as Sam Mendes’ monotonous direction. (He’s not the only one sleepwalking through this show: bring a pillow.)

If you’re paying attention, the show is impossible to like: Hare would have us cease our sideline percolations and get involved, but the only thing he does here is to use leftovers from Stuff Happens mixed with some half-drawn Relationships in Turmoil, in this case between a father and son (Nighy and Bittner) and a girl (Julianne Moore). Words are exchanged easily enough between Moore and her cohorts, but that’s only because Moore doesn’t seem to be taking them in: like a rag doll waiting to be posed, she brings a lifeless resignation to a character who talks constantly about the need to be up in arms.

The show’s also desperately in need of cuts: the bookending scenes add little to the plot and only slightly more to Moore’s character, and the scene-changing monologues serve only to blandly foreshadow a show that doesn’t have any suspense. It’s also worth considering that nothing cracks on the exterior (or even happens) until the end of the first act. Yes, it’s a character piece and yes, it’s setting things up—but that excuse is only valid if the characters are interesting, and if the story goes to another level later. There are two relationships that die in this play, and neither one of them happens onstage.

We have too little time in our real lives to waste it listening to people talking about their fake ones: give me something that I can take away from a performance… at least entertain me. This play, almost as static and sedentary as the large scene-stealing tree, doesn’t even do that.