Broadway hit The Vertical Hour comes to Montecasino
MONTECASINO - Politics and philosophy collide in an intellectual drama on the Pieter Toerien Theatre stage.
A debate on the 2003 invasion of Iraq by America, and a musing on the tension between our inner and outer lives, David Hare’s The Vertical Hour premiered on Broadway in 2006. Celebrated as the fastest selling new play in the history of the UK’s Royal Court, The Vertical Hour now appears on local stages, where Fred Abrahamse directs Michael Richard, Richard Gau, Jaco van Rensburg, Jackie Rens and Sinakho Zokuta.
The play centres around an encounter between Nadia Blye (Rens), former war correspondent and American academic, and British doctor, Oliver Lucas (Richard). Its title recalls Nadia’s explanation, during a fraught pre-dawn conversation between the two in Oliver’s Shropshire home, that the vertical hour is that moment in combat medicine after a disaster “when you can actually be of some use”.
Nadia has accompanied her boyfriend Philip (Gau), to visit his father, Oliver, in Britain, where she finds herself caught in intellectual debate with Oliver, as the two clash on the moral questions surrounding America’s invasion of Iraq. As the play progresses, Nadia’s certainty of her place in the world and her opinion of it are challenged by Oliver, whose intervention has far-reaching consequences for all three scarred protagonists.
The Vertical Hour questions the responsibilities of medicine, the treatment of political wounds, and the very choices we face in living our lives. Hailed by the Guardian as “a definition of good drama…rich and intellectually gripping”, The Vertical Hour brings the debates of politics versus philosophy, private versus public, to life.
“The Vertical Hour shows that it’s deluded and damaging to suppose that you can set aside personal agonies and equally harmful to view the outside world as a projection of private passions,” according to a review by LDN Independent. “So how do you relate the inner to the outer? This difficult question, sensitively and subtly realised here, will continue to nag the mind long afterwards.”
Details: Studio Theatre, Montecasino; 1 October-9 November; 011 511 1818; www.computicket.com
