From Mrs Hughes to monster
Scarcely recognisable, Downton’s Phyllis Logan drips venom as feted but vile author Patricia Highsmith
PHYLLIS LogAN is an admirably flexible actress. Although known to millions as Downton Abbey’s solidly correct housekeeper Mrs Hughes, she is currently playing a sclerotic, terminally-ill crime novelist in the West End transfer of Joanna Murray-Smith’s Switzerland.
Its 90 minutes are well-acted and there is a good twist near the end, but this two-hander is possibly a little too cryptic.
The novelist in question is Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995). Her books included The Talented Mr Ripley and Strangers on A Train, which was turned into a Hitchcock chiller in 1951. Highsmith’s plots went big on evil, amorality, selfishness and murder. She herself ended up a pretty nasty piece of work. By the end of her life she did not seem to have time for love (except for her pet snails) or even vanity. To look at, she could have been W.H. Auden’s sister. Drink and cigarettes had taken their toll on her body, while loneliness soured her soul.
As such, Highsmith is promising material for a dramatist, even if her more obnoxious remarks about Jews, blacks, Latinos and Roman Catholics may startle modern theatregoers. The show’s programme admits that she was an ‘equal-opportunity offender’ who was foul to everyone.
The play opens with Highsmith working one morning alone in her Swiss-Alpine home. gleaming white mountains are visible through the windows; inside the room, as she taps on her typewriter, a smokier, more claustrophobic air prevails.
Highsmith is expecting a visitor: Edward, a publishing assistant from New York who is coming to try to get her to sign a contract for one last novel in her popular Ripley series. Suave killer Tom Ripley was Highsmith’s most saleable character.
She explains that she is drawn to him because killers are transgressors, and people who transgress make interesting subjects for writers.
Highsmith tells her young male visitor that she needs his help with plot ideas. If he can dream up a good murder plan, she will sign his book deal.
Miss Logan is convincingly horrible as Highsmith, though I might have liked her to be slower in her nastiness at the start. Really rude people use silence in a threatening way. The dyspeptic wisecracks become a little predictable.
Calum Finlay is excellent as the apparently naive New Yorker. Highsmith keeps telling the handsome boy how wet and useless and deluded he is. ‘I don’t think I’m deluded,’ he says. ‘That’s ’cos you’re deluded,’ she snaps. An implausible amount of whisky and cigarettes are consumed and there are some droll observations on late 20th-century Manhattan and on life in Switzerland.
Eventually, Highsmith learns to like, or at least tolerate, her young visitor. But is he everything he seems?
And does there come a point where a novelist is consumed by (killed by) the characters she has created? Fans
of Highsmith’s books will be at a strong advantage in understanding this play. Newcomers to her work might appreciate greater explanation of her output, and even some reflections on the more generous person that she was as a younger woman.
In the end, the sheer negativity of her personality may leave us too cold to worry much about her fate. But bravo to Miss Logan and Mr Finlay.