In what she has said herself in the Wise Children podcast is a bit of a departure for her, Emma Rice has turned to the heavily plot-driven Hitchcock thriller North by Northwest for her latest adaptation to stage.
The film, with a screenplay by Ernest Lehman, was another attempt by Hitchcock at the 39 Steps story of mistaken identity and espionage. In this production, faithful to the original, Ewan Wardrop is the handsome if rather too full-of-himself New York businessman Roger Thornhill who, through an unfortunate but just about plausible coincidence, is assumed by some shady foreign spies (Mirabelle Gremaud and Simon Oskarsson) to be the American agent George Kaplan.
They kidnap 'Kaplan' and take him to their leader—Karl Queensborough retaining the suave, upper-class Englishness of James Mason from the film—Philip Vandamm. The other famous events from the film are all here: sending him down the mountain road behind the wheel of a car drunk, trying to persuade his mother (also played by Queensborough) that he was kidnapped and not at a party, getting accused of murder in front of many witnesses and trying to track down the real George Kaplan to clear his name.
While escaping from the police on a train, 'Hitchcock blonde' Eve Kendall (Patrycja Kujawska) hides him and seems to be attracted by his charms—the feeling is mutual—but she is not all she seems. In one of the most famous moments from the film, Thornhill is chased through a cornfield by a crop-dusting biplane, staged in a very Emma Rice way. After a double-revelation to Roger about Eve, the other famous scene, the escape down the faces of Mount Rushmore, again is achieved in a theatrical way involving clever use of a lot of suitcases, as does the whole production—an Emma Rice trope going right back to The Red Shoes.
The head of the CIA, 'The Professor', is played by the irrepressible Katy Owen as another upper-class Englishman as he was by Leo G Carroll in the film (were all top American spies really English public school-types in 1959?), but the part is greatly expanded to also be the narrator, relating with the detail of a spy's observation report not just the links between the scenes but often the things we can actually see happening as well.
The production is full of ingenious 'Ricean' touches in the staging. Unusually for Wise Children, there is no live music, but composer and sound designer Simon Baker has put together an effective soundtrack, plus there are prerecorded songs performed with Dennis Potter-style lip-syncing and quirky movement and dance from choreographer Etta Murfitt. Rob Howell's set design is very clever in its use of four huge, elegant revolving doors that slide in and out to represent every location in the play, the precise location and some characters defined by signs on suitcases, while the back wall is filled by a costume rail for on-stage costume changes.
My companion, who enjoyed it, said it seemed quite "tame" for an Emma Rice production, and I know what she meant. It certainly has her fingerprints all over it, but there are few big 'wow' moments of something we didn't expect or haven't seen her do before—even the famous scenes are staged cleverly and effectively but not spectacularly. There is also a bit of a clash between the extra touches and the fast pace of a thriller; the extensive narration fits with the concept but a lot of it is superfluous for storytelling, and some of the songs go on a bit too long and get in the way of the action.
The ending of the film wasn't satisfying to Rice, and so she has the ambitious and very capable Eve Kendall want more than just to be a wife—and, happily, we see her achieve it.
A new Emma Rice production is always something to be celebrated, and this doesn't disappoint—the cast are terrific as always, and fans of the film won't be disappointed as it is extremely faithful to the original without resorting to parody, as so many of these types of adaptations do, but it is still a couple of hours of great fun.