Chasing Hitchcock’s accidental spy to the stage
Making a stage play out of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 Cold War thriller North by Northwest seems counterintuitive, if not downright foolhardy.
It’s the most eye-popping of Hitch’s movies, shot using the VistaVision widescreen process at a time when Hollywood was doing its level best to compete with the smallscreen upstart known as television.
The film is constantly in motion. Cary Grant’s fugitive ad man Roger O. Thornhill, accidentally taken as a spy by nefarious nogoodniks, races across the screen from New York’s crowded streets to a Midwest cornfield — where a crop-dusting plane attacks — to the presidential visages of Mt. Rushmore.
Thornhill proves unstoppable and also unflappable. Small wonder that 007 author Ian Fleming wanted Grant to play James Bond in Dr. No three years later, until destiny (and producers) handed the prize to an unknown named Sean Connery. Grant nevertheless clearly influenced generations of Bonds, as he later would Jon Hamm’s ad ace Don Draper on TV’s Mad Men.
How do you contain all this on a single stage? Quite cleverly, it turns out. Director Simon Phillips’ live North by Northwest shows how to do it at the Royal Alexandra Theatre, in a Mirvish production that runs through Oct. 29.
Jonathan Watton is Thornhill, Olivia Fines is mysterious blond Eve Kendall and Gerald Kyd is sinister pursuer Phillip Vandamm. They’re part of a cast where many of the actors play multiple roles, appropriate to a story of “surfaces and deceptions,” as someone says unkindly about the ad biz.
Rather than be daunted by the many visual challenges of North by Northwest, Phillips and his team instead have fun with them, using a large video screen and digital tricks to merrily conjure Hitchcock’s grand vision.
They even manage to recreate the kinetic title sequence by Saul Bass. The one thing they couldn’t quite manage was to make Watton look as good in a grey suit as Grant, but then there really has never been anybody like Cary Grant for rocking the threads. (The movie Thornhill manages to look cool even when Thornhill is falling down drunk or running from the machine guns of the crop duster.)
The secret to adapting North by Northwest to the stage is finding the essential humour in what is otherwise a very twisting and teasing tale, says playwright Carolyn Burns, who remains loyal to Ernest Lehman’s screenplay while adding delightful flourishes of her own.
The New Zealand writer, visiting Toronto for the play’s local debut, told me she thought of Mad magazine’s Spy vs. Spy cartoons while writing her Hitchcock adaptation.
“I think this is one of his most humorous films — I absolutely love the humour!” she says.
The audience certainly dialed “M” for “mirth” at the performance I attended, picking up on the subtle jokes Burns employs, which include a shout-out to Hitchcock’s masterpiece Vertigo and a triumphant razzing of a certain Tweeter in Chief. She even manages the nifty efficiency of combining Hitchcock’s famous cameo from the film with a scene where Thornhill commandeers a cab from a baffled bystander.
A former newspaper and TV journalist, Burns also delights in work- ing in sly references to real-world espionage and intrigue, resonating with many a 2017 front page. Historical accuracy also mattered to her. She went so far as to Google how the weather was in New York in May 1960, at the height of Cold War tensions between the U.S. and Russia, to better approximate the mood of the film’s setting.
“It was those kinds of little thrills that you do get as a writer,” she says.
One thing that Burns didn’t do was assume that the audience would have already seen the film version of North by Northwest, something I would have thought would be a given.
On the contrary, Burns assumed that most people would be walking in cold and would likely need a little help with a complicated plot.
“Absolutely it was my assumption; I always knew that. I don’t really like adapting films. I’ve only done one other ( High Society), but I like adapting novels and books and I just assume (people) haven’t read them.
“I’m not saying audiences are ignorant. I believe audiences are very intelligent and if they haven’t seen this film, they need to understand the plot from the beginning — and it is Spy vs. Spy. Who are the baddies? I love confusing them about who the baddies are. In fact, my major theme was the fact they’re both as bad as each other. So I just needed to exploit that a bit more because Hitchcock was not really into solving those problems.”
What might Hitch have thought of his films being turned into stage plays? His 1935 spy thriller The 39 Steps has also been on the boards, and there surely must be plans somewhere for live versions of Vertigo and The Birds.
Hitchcock isn’t around to comment, but he did make this oftquoted observation to filmmaker/ interviewer François Truffaut: “What is drama, after all, but life with the dull bits cut out?”
This holds true whether you see North by Northwest on screen or stage. Sick Kids star power: Canadian actor Ryan Reynolds has been in many superhero screen skirmishes. Now he’s lending his fame to a Hospital for Sick Children fundraising campaign to build a new Sick Kids and also to promote children’s health. Reynolds made a video with 300 Sick Kids staff that is now hitting TV and is also on YouTube. Peter Howell is the Star’s movie critic. His column usually runs Friday.