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Teletubby approach

Lloyd Evans

Wednesday, 30th January 2008

The President’s Holiday
Hampstead

The Sea
Haymarket

The Vertical Hour
Royal Court

Not that Stop The War did anything to stop the war. They just talked. And they strolled around Hyde Park one afternoon, which must have had Blair quaking in his boots. ‘Oh, my God, they hate me so much they’re taking exercise.’ They avoided any tactic that might have been practical or far-sighted (or inconvenient to themselves) like withholding their taxes and going to jail. They talked and walked, and they thought that was enough, and here’s a slice of that talk and it may surprise you to hear it’s absorbing and done with great intelligence, honesty and perceptiveness. Hare’s main difficulty was to make the chitchat theatrical. His solution, a domestic love triangle, is meagre but effective.

Leftie Dad meets his son’s American neocon girlfriend and they lock horns over Iraq while flirting heavily. The whiney son lurks in the background fetching tea and grinding his teeth. This is a flawed play (the first and last scenes are superfluous), but its central acts are sophisticated and pleasantly unshowy. The word is king. Even if you disagree wildly with Hare you’ll find what he says provocative and shrewdly argued. The casting could be better. Anton Lesser (the priapic Dad) is about as steamy as a cup of cocoa. I never believed for one second that the bustily gorgeous Nadia (Indira Varma) would ditch her scruffy pin-up of a boyfriend for such a bloodless creep. This is a play to see soon because the issues it examines are already lining up for the curtain call of history.