Hitchcock on stage? Nice try, but they’ve kidnapped the wrong film
The holy grail for theatre producers is to find the next
The 39 Steps. Pick a classic that everyone knows, or thinks they know, reinvent it for the stage, and watch the money roll in. It’s harder than it looks, but in the case of John Buchan’s thriller, as rendered by Hitchcock and larked about with by Patrick Barlow (himself amending a prior, four-player version), the result was a stonking success in the West End and on Broadway, with productions around the world, too.
On paper, North by Northwest looks like a promising candidate to follow in that mega-hit’s footsteps. Hitchcock’s 1959 masterpiece of suspense and spiralling paranoia about a Madison Avenue adman (Cary Grant) thrust, via a case of mistaken identity, into a web of intrigue and the arms of a seeming femme fatale (Eva Marie Saint) grips from start to finish.
Unless I’m much mistaken, though, this stage version is going to head precisely nowhere. Why? Because despite impressive quantities of quick-changing ensemble energy, and no little invention, the show only half-succeeds in shifting a compelling story from one medium to another; it retains unflattering points of comparison with the original without fully embracing the chance to do something new.
When this adaptation (by Carolyn Burns) was first mounted in Melbourne in 2015, it didn’t try too hard to offer a correlative to the cinematography.
In Simon Phillips’s bold repurposing of her script, lots of technical resources are deployed to create a sort of DIY MGM Studios, with the actors taking to side-booths to operate miniature locations that are video-relayed into the main playing area, dominated by encaging walls of grid-like metal. Given the variety and scale of the settings into which Hitchcock deposited Roger Thornhill (mistaken for the non-existent, decoy spy “George Kaplan”) – from opulent country house and precipitous roadside to desolate farmland in which, famously, our bewildered yet heroically unflustered protagonist gets attacked by a crop-duster plane – it’s not a dumb move.
And there’s a pleasure to be had in seeing, say, a deftly manipulated dinky cityscape transforming, via the power of projection, into a looming backdrop. An air of studious concentration mixed with tongue-in-cheek seriousness prevails among these actor-operators. At its best, as when four twitching faces combine to evoke the Mount Rushmore denouement, you get the sense of a spot-on solution being arrived at via a moment of cliff-edge panic.
Yet the novelty of the approach overall stales soon enough, and too often the laborious handiwork distracts from the main action. Not that you need much help getting distracted. In a dutiful retread of scenes that fans will know backwards, Jonathan Watton is to Cary Grant what plywood is to a mighty oak, and even though she brings blonde-bombshell allure to the role of enigmatic Eve, Olivia Fines can’t escape the shadow of her sainted celluloid forebear.
The doomy, string-laden soundtrack sends a chill down the spine but also points you straight back to the original film, still easily available to own or rent, for a minimal sum and maximum enjoyment.