Hitchcock hit that’s heading in one direction ... up
ALFRED Hitchcock’s 1959 film North By Northwest has been brought to the stage in a quick, slick, wry, clever production – the cheeriest show this summer. Many recent plays have been suffused with pessimism but here, hooray, is an evening of unbridled entertainment.
Hitchcock’s glamorous thriller becomes something more like a comedy thriller, with a measure of affectionate satire.
It honours the plot but at the same time sends up some of the action scenes and the late Fifties fashion.
The film is best remembered for a scene in which a crop- duster plane opens fire on Cary Grant’s Roger Thornhill, a Manhattan advertising guy mistaken by baddies for an FBI agent. Thornhill becomes the target of hitmen working for a shadowy foreign spy boss who wants to smuggle a top-secret microfilm out of the United States.
As his fortunes spiral, Thornhill is seduced on an overnight train by a gorgeous blonde. He has a pint of bourbon poured down his throat and is later stopped by traffic police. He causes mayhem at an auction and ends up climbing all over the presidential monument at Mount Rushmore. One way and another, this is not an easy story to translate to the theatre.
Director Simon Phillips and playwright Carolyn Burns get round that with various ingenious image projections and stage jokes, along with a multi-tasking cast who play scores of characters. Abigail McKern, Roddy Peters, a wonderfully rubbery-faced Nick Harris and others give us some terrific vignettes. Miss McKern would make a fine Queen Mother one day.
At the centre of it all is Jonathan Watton’s Thornhill, suited almost as handsomely as Cary Grant. Gerald Kyd clenches his jaw muscles to terrific effect as the villain and Olivia Fines – in a dress faithful to the film – is excellent as the blonde seductress Eve.
Some of the toy scenery in the projections looks like something out of Thunderbirds but that accentuates the spirit of playfulness and melodrama. The sentimental wit of the production values owes something to recent London theatre successes The Play That Goes Wrong and The 39 Steps and it would not surprise me if this show headed east by southeast to the West End.