We study the motion of a particle in the hyperbolic plane (embedded in Minkowski space), under the action of a potential that depends only on one variable. This problem is the analogous to the spherical pendulum in a unidirectional force field. However, for the discussion of the hyperbolic plane one has to distinguish three inequivalent cases, depending on the direction of the force field. Symmetry reduction, with respect to groups that are not necessarily compact or even reductive, is carried out by way of Poisson varieties and Hilbert maps. For each case the dynamics is discussed, with special attention to linear potentials.

We present a new approach to singular reduction of Hamiltonian systems with symmetries. The tools we use are the category of differential spaces of Sikorski and the Stefan-Sussmann theorem. The former is applied to analyze the differential structure of the spaces involved and the latter is used to prove that some of these spaces are smooth manifolds. Our main result is the identification of accessible sets of the generalized distribution spanned by the Hamiltonian vector fields of invariant functions with singular reduced spaces. We are also able to describe the differential structure of a singular reduced space corresponding to a coadjoint orbit which need not be locally closed.