The Minister finds himself shivering in sub-zero New York City.

Last night I paid $200 for two tickets to see The Vertical Hour, the new Broadway play by Sir David Hare starring Bill Nighy and Julianne Moore, at the charming Music Box Theatre (built by Irving Berlin, no less).

In the words of the Minister’s wife, Sir David has “fallen off a bit”.

I do not believe the following analysis of the Iraq invasion to be worth $200 of my – or anyone else’s – money:

Moore: “Oh, God – we really made a mess of it, didn’t we?”

Nighy: “You could say that.”

Now that Harold Pinter is effectively out of commission, Hare is theroretically the best dramatic polemicist the British Isles has left to offer.  If that’s the case, I should be up for the 2008 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Hare has Nighy’s character complaining about his enormous self-esteem and crushing lack of self-confidence.  It’s a shame Hare’s gone the other way.

Julianne Moore, incidentally, may be preternaturally beautiful but she can’t act on stage to save her life.  And if Nighy’s twitches, tics and gurning are not genuine acting, he needs to see a neurologist immediately for some extra strength Dopamine.

Two hours and fifteen minutes and I still don’t know whether or not it was meant to be a comedy…

Celeb-spotting so far: we sat in front of the BBC’s Brian Barron on the flight over (he’s a big jazz fan; and he agrees that the BBC’s news output these days “is not the best” but doesn’t want to sound like a grumpy old dinosaur about it) and while taking the backstage tour at the Metropolitan Opera we bumped into the small-but-perfectly-formed West Wing alumnus Kristin Chenoweth.