David Hare’s last play, Stuff Happens, was a docudrama about the war in Iraq which opened at the National and moved to New York. The Vertical Hour is a fiction on substantially the same subject and could well make the opposite journey, presumably with Sam Mendes still as director and, conceivably, with Julianne Moore as the American war correspondent who becomes a political analyst and a Yale professor, and proceeds to shack up with a British bloke who works in New England as a “physical therapist”.

It is unusual for Broadway to give a premiere to a play that is as topical as it is serious, articulate, witty and absorbing, and yet I can’t say that I exactly warmed to The Vertical Hour. Or, rather, it left me feeling the way I do about much of George Bernard Shaw’s work.

The play fizzes with intellectual passion but tends to falter when things get inner and personal. It is almost as if Hare is in a debate with himself on a truckload of subjects, starting with the rights and wrongs of Iraq. Most of this debate occurs in rural Shropshire, because it is there that Andrew Scott’s Philip takes Nadia (Moore) and there that she meets his equally argumentative father, Oliver (Bill Nighy). She is a liberal convinced by her experience of Sarajevo that the West, meaning America, has a responsibility to intervene when evil and injustice flourish abroad. Oliver is a liberal, too, but he is a fierce opponent of the war and believes that she was used by an Administration whose conduct of it has been at best inept, at worst wicked.

Since Nadia ends up saying, “Jesus, what a mess”, it is pretty clear whom Hare supports, yet there is a strong show of evenhandedness here, as there is when he tackles subjects ranging from Freud (Nighy for, Moore against) to open marriage (he for, she against). I suppose the play could be attacked as too discursive, but I prefer to see that as a sign of a mental curiosity seldom encountered on Broadway. Rather, the twin dramatic problems are Nadia’s relationship with Philip and Philip’s with Oliver. Is it plausible that, whatever her weariness with war reportage, this bright, mature woman would fall for a thirtyish man who seems not only terminally dull but infantile in his love-hate feelings for his dad?

Although it is probably meant to show that conflict and the need for negotiation exist in the private worlds that underlie and help to shape the public ones, this side of the play seemed to me unconvincing, uninteresting or both. Certainly, poor Scott can do little with so weedy a character. And Nighy and Moore? Well, he fidgets, jerks and vocally slithers about while she strives to be tough and incisive. He is mannered but arresting; she is unpretentious but samey and unexciting.

But then maybe you can’t expect emotional depth in a play where, just after meeting each other, characters say things such as “People blame materialism because they feel it doesn’t nourish them”, or “As long as we had two superpowers in some sort of balance, then there seemed to be a procedure for determining the world’s affairs”. That is, after all, Hare in his Shavian mode.

Box office: 001 212-239-6200