‘North by Northwest’ review: Emma Rice makes a playful adaptation of a Hitchcock classic
Adapting a beloved film for the theatre is treacherous territory, especially when the film was directed by Alfred Hitchcock. North by Northwest is one the most celebrated and recognisable movies from the Master of Suspense, but director Emma Rice took up the challenge with her trademark enthusiasm and light-heartedness, and she’s turned it into a play that is fizzing with silliness and energy.
The story is a notoriously twisty one. Roger Thornhill, an innocuous adman in New York, becomes caught up in a game of high-stakes Cold War intrigue when he is mistaken for a non-existent American operative named George Kaplan. Chased by mysterious foreign enemies, he becomes involved with an alluring woman named Eve Kendall, who is either the only person he can trust or the last person he can trust.
Hitchcock’s film stars Cary Grant as Thornhill and Eva Marie Saint as Kendall, and it’s oozing with the kind of glamour that defined nearly all of his movies of the period. It is also, crucially, full of big-budget cinematic production values. In one key scene, Thornhill is chased through cornfields by a crop-duster plane. In another, he and Kendall dangle off the side of Mount Rushmore. Replicating this for the theatre seems bound for anticlimax, but luckily, Rice and her creative team were up to the task.
Instead of attempting to mimic the scale of Hitchcock’s film, they went for comedy, making economical use of suitcases by labelling them as the various locations that can’t be easily replicated by theatre set designers. When a car crash is in order, two suitcases collide, one reading ‘POLICE CAR’ and the other ‘CAR’. I won’t spoil what forms the crop-duster or Mount Rushmore take, but suffice it to say that they bring gales of laughter rather than gasps of awe.
Comedy spills from every corner of the show, often acting as decompression points between plot twists. Rice has often incorporated music into her productions, and North by Northwest is no exception. A tender duet between Thornhill (played by Ewan Wardrop) and a police officer is a high point, as is a particularly tense moment in an elevator when everyone bursts into a rendition of ‘Get Happy’. These moments are where the production is at its best — when it steps outside the story and leans into Rice’s whimsy.
One pivotal decision does not coalesce quite as well. The introduction of a narrator called the Professor (played by Katy Owens) can be too tongue-in-cheek for its own good. The goal of the character, presumably, is to make sure the audience is paying attention to and understanding the complex plot, but given that the film and the play have enough wit and pizazz to keep you entertained even if the plot evades you in some scenes, it can feel laboured and even a bit patronising, veering dangerously into panto territory.
In an interview with Far Out, Rice talked about how, when adapting Ernest Lehman’s script, the greatest unexpected treasure trove was the stage directions. “They are laugh-out-loud funny and really beautifully written,” she said, “And I found a way of weaving them in through a narrative voice that I feel is really true to the film but actually gives a really unique piece to the theatre.” It seems likely, then, that the Professor’s lines are drawn largely from these stage directions, which leads to what will probably be a dividing point for audiences. Ultimately, this is an adaptation of Lehman’s script rather than Hitchcock’s film. If you arrive at the theatre without the burden of reverence for the movie, you may well find every creative choice here, including the Professor’s narration, to be spot-on.
There are a few key deviations from the original script that land with varying degrees of success. Creating backstories for the characters, particularly regarding where they were during the war, adds depth to the story. 1959 was barely a decade after the end of the world-splitting conflict, and everyone carried baggage from it in some way. The ending, which I will not spoil, does not work as well. It brings a note of unexpected sincerity to the proceedings, undercutting the delightful sense of fun that lightens the rest of the evening.
As far as the performances go, Rice has kept the cast to a tidy ensemble of six who take on various roles throughout the production. As Thornhill, Wardrop is a charming everyman who fits more into the mould of Jack Lemmon than Cary Grant. As Kendall, Patrycja Kujawska is more age-appropriate than Eva Marie Saint, but there is little chemistry between the leads, which makes the central tension over Eve’s true allegiances far less engaging.
As a whole, the stakes do feel secondary. If the film is a stylish thriller, Rice’s stage adaptation skips right over caper and into farce. There is little suspense to be had but plenty of witty one-liners, comedic musical numbers, and sight gags. Where your preferences lie on this genre spectrum is likely to determine your sentiments when you leave the theatre.
North by Northwest is playing at the York Theatre Royal through April 5th, touring through June 22nd.
