A smart take on Hollywood power struggles

Double Feature

Hampstead Theatre, London NW3 ★★★★★

Alfred Hitchcock was a brilliant filmmaker, but he was a complicated man with a penchant for manipulating and controlling his icy blonde leading ladies. Directing Tippi Hedren in the 1964 film Marnie in the twilight of his career, this knottiness in his directorial style spilled over into the domineering power-play unsettlingly depicted in John Logan’s new play Double Feature.

As the title indicates, the emotional chess between Hitchcock (Ian McNeice) and Hedren (Joanna Vanderham) is one of two entwined stories that examine the push and pull between a director and their star. The other, set in a Suffolk country cottage in 1967, sees Vincent Price (Jonathan Hyde) foisted upon neophyte director Michael Reeves (Rowan Polonski) for his horror film Witchfinder General. Reeves wants Price to restrain his hammy, scene-chewing tendencies but humiliated Price is threatening to walk, leaving Reeves’s career hanging in the balance. Veteran and visionary lock horns in a tussle about the nature of art on a film set.

In a stroke of visually shrewd theatricality, both stories play out simultaneously but autonomously in the same space with all four protagonists on stage throughout. Mirrored images, parallel themes and overlapping lines are woven into these interlocking dramas.

Hedren and Hitchcock’s conversations are always ostensibly about making Marnie, but Logan laces Hitchcock’s dialogue with uncomfortably sexualised double entendres which McNeice delivers with deadpan poise. In combination with the queasy emotions that flicker over Vanderham’s mesmerising, vividly expressive face, the tension within the uneven power dynamic ratchets up to disturbing levels.

At times, the two stories read like cerebral and visceral sides of the same coin, but there’s no escaping the disparity of gender regarding notions of status, agency and age. Because he has plucked Hedren from modelling “mediocrity”, elevated her to movie star “immortality” and signed her to a personal contract, Hitchcock feels an objectified ownership over Hedren. On the other hand, Reeves’s febrile cineaste might be decades younger than the “camp grand old dame” Price, but he’s still nominally Price’s boss and their exchanges are more evenly matched.

Jonathan Kent’s production’s footsure performances and clever central conceit ensure that this new drama – executed with satisfyingly filmic élan – whizzes by.

Until March 16. Tickets: 020 7722 9301; hampsteadtheatre.com

Emotional chess: Joanna Vanderham as Hedren and Ian McNeice as Hitchcock