A CHILLER TO SEND YOU OFF THE RAILS
PATRICIA Highsmith’s chiller Strangers On A Train is one of those taut tales where you wish things would not keep going quite so terribly wrong. It mucks about with your mind to the point that you hope two cold-blooded murderers will escape detection.
Alfred Hitchcock made a 1951 film out of this ingenious plot. Now it has reached the stage in an effective adaptation that opened in Brighton this week and will soon chug off on tour (stopping at Sheffield’s Lyceum Theatre next week, and eventually pulling into Cardiff at the end of March).
Preppy architect Guy Haines is heading to Texas on a train, peacefully reading some Plato. Haines (played by Jack Ashton) is unhappily married.
His peace is broken by an apparently convivial drunk, Charles Bruno (Christopher Harper). After a few drinks, Bruno persuades Haines to clink glasses on a horrible deal: he will kill Haines’s wife if Haines will kill Bruno’s rich and overbearing father.
This is one of several moments when you want to shout ‘don’t do it, chum!’ Highsmith’s genius was to see that a bad idea can sink its hook into you and soon send your life into a frightful vortex. At the start of the play, Haines seems to have everything. By the middle of the show he is in danger of losing his job, his fiancee and his freedom.
The action switches from the luxurious railway carriage to Bruno’s family home to Haines’s flat, and later the house he shares with his second wife (once the first one has been bumped off). Director Anthony Banks copes with these challenging scene changes by using sliding panels and by setting some of the more marginal scenes in boxy corners. It all looks a bit like the old TV quiz show Celebrity Squares at times, but on the whole it works. THE
acting is pretty good. Mr Ashton makes a handsome, taciturn Haines. Mr Harper lends Bruno a nervy campness, although scenes with his mother (Helen Anderson) push credibility at times.
Hannah Tointon is a delight as Haines’s new woman — she plays drunkenness particularly well — and John Middleton does a fine turn as a former policeman who becomes suspicious after Bruno’s father is shot in his bed.
An almost full Theatre Royal in Brighton seemed gripped, despite much ‘ fluridden spluttering ( the theatre’s stalls might as well have been a doctor’s clinic). Highsmith is unrelenting in cranking up the misery for the foolish Haines.
We are left in no doubt about the stupidity of ever agreeing, even when drunk, to murderous schemes. Yet still we sympathise with him because Bruno is such a swine. It helps that we never see either of the murder victims.
I suppose Strangers On A Train also teaches us never to fall into too matey a conversation with anyone on a long, comfortable railway journey.
There is little chance of that on the uncomfortable and unreliable service which links Brighton and London — but you should not entirely discount the possibility of long- suffering passengers on Thameslink or Southern Railway developing murderous thoughts.
■ ACTReSS Sophie Khan Levy displays impressive memory in a 70-minute solo performance as a mother,
HANNA, whose baby was swapped in a maternity hospital. Hanna was 18 when the child was born, and although she noticed something was wrong (er, the infant was the wrong colour), she did not press her concerns.
Three years later a DNA test proves that she and a richer, older woman were given the wrong babies by a drunk nurse.
Miss Khan Levy not only remembers a long monologue but also conveys the forgiving nature of this young mum. Sam Potter’s tale is mildly interesting, so far as it goes, though implausible in places ( a real single mum from Hemel Hempstead might be rather less fey than Hanna).
Beyond the hardly revolutionary idea that ‘ family’ can transcend blood ties, it is hard to discern much philosophical novelty.
The evening has some sweet reflections on early parenthood but most of these seemed lost on the Arcola’s audience of trendy millennials, few of whom looked old enough to have started having children.
For tour details of Hanna, visit papatango. co.uk. For Strangers on A Train, see atgtickets.com