BWW Reviews: THE VERTICAL HOUR, Park Theatre, September 25 2014

Nadia supports George W Bush's Iraq War. That hasn't gone down well with her feminist and liberal friends at Yale where she teaches International Relations. Nor does it sit easily with Oliver, her boyfriend's father, who is hosting her first visit to his hideaway in Shropshire. But, having seen at first hand how Western indifference played out during her time as a journalist in war-ravaged, disintegrating Yugoslavia, she is happy to see War War rather than Jaw Jaw in Iraq. And if you're thinking "Christopher Hitchens", so was I.

Nadia's work life is about seeking accommodation between irreconcilable parties and so too is her love life, as she is caught in the crossfire between Oliver and his son Philip. Philip blames his father's womanising for his mother's mental breakdown and Oliver cannot disguise his contempt for his son's choice to work as a "physical therapist" for top dollar in the USA - and his pain at his son's estrangment from him. Nadia just can't see why two men whom she respects can have so little of that quality for each other.

David Hare's The Vertical Hour (continuing at the Park Theatre until 26 October) may date from 2006, but with Parliament recalled for another vote on military action e'en as I write, its topicality is undiminished. And, as with the long agony of the peoples of the region, despite lots and lots of talk, answers come there none.

Thusitha Jayasundera makes Nadia comply perfectly with Oliver's description of her: "She could have any man on the campus..." - indeed, she is so smart and sexy that one wonders why she ever fell for Finlay Robertson's whiny Philip, even if she is on the rebound from a Polish triple-alpha war correspondent. She is at her best playing off Peter Davison's Oliver, the doctor whose passions are not quite as buried in the Welsh hills as he would like. Davison moves about a lot, in and out of Nadia's personal space, as their confessions of past errors bring them closer, then drive them apart. Davison is plenty charismatic, but he's creepy too, giving just enough credence to his son's screaming accusations for us to believe them.

Clever people do not always make the best judgements and their access to sophisticated lines of argument and reasoning does not quell, never mind invalidate, the emotions that share space in their oh so educated heads. This seems to be the message of the epilogue in which Nadia gives a student calm, considered advice before doing the opposite with consequences we are left to deduce. Hearts and Minds may need to be won in any battle, but bringing them together in one person is hard enough - never mind across a whole culture.

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