North By Northwest (touring) ★★★★

By The Recs SCD 3 weeks ago

Alfred Hitchcock’s ultimate chase thriller, North By Northwest, is adapted for the stage by Wise Children’s Emma Rice

There are many reasons that the movie North By Northwest has retained such popularity since it was released in 1959. In many ways, it’s an anthology of so many familiar Hitchcockian tropes gathered in one film: the mistaken identity of an innocent man, an inscrutable blonde femme fatale, plot reversals you don’t see coming, suspenseful chases, regular locations becoming sinister, and of course, a MacGuffin!

But beyond this, there was something unusually zeitgeisty about the film. Cold war machinations imbue North By Northwest with an overarching and persistent sense of unease and distrust. The theme of mistaken identity is expanded into the wider context of not being able to be certain who anyone really is – with spies taking on other identities, double agents assuming a duality of roles and even a decoy who it transpires doesn’t even exist. Hitchcock repeats the suggestion that under the veneer of sharp suits, urbane sophistication and superficial attractiveness lurks something altogether darker.

It’s the latter of these interpretations that seems to underpin Emma Rice’s take on North By Northwest. That’s not to say that she takes the vicarious thrills out of the original – far from it – but there is a clear aim that the story should not merely be a weightless picaresque.
 
Images by Steve Tanner
Narratively, the show follows the story beats of Ernest Lehman’s delightfully twisty original screenplay – even purloining some of his script’s most polished bon mots. Madison Avenue advertising executive Roger Thornhill’s comfortable life is turned on its head when he is mistaken by a nefarious spy ring for a “George Caplin”. It’s not long before he has to flee from both the police and international criminals never knowing who he can trust or understanding the world of espionage and murder he has entered.
 
Wise Children’s production relies on just six multi-talented performers to tell North By Northwest’s fast paced, far-ranging tale. Shorn of Hitchcock’s cinematic techniques and multiple locations, the company deploy a myriad of theatrical devices to immerse the audience into their world of comedic thrills. A choreographic blur of appearing and disappearing suitcases, each inscribed with a character or scene description, defines the geography of the story. The cast, with the exception of Ewan Wardrop who plays Thornhill, play multiple characters with minimal costume additions. For instance, with Karl Queensborough playing the oily baddie Phillip Vandamm one minute and with the aid of a fur-collared coat, is transformed into Thornhill’s high-society mother the next, the script cannot resist a meta joke about the two bearing a striking resemblance to each other. 

If this sounds similar to Patrick Barlow’s The 39 Steps which tours frequently, there are some shared theatrical DNA but this is a far more sophisticated beast. It has greater commonality with Voloz Collective’s more movement-based The Man Who Thought He Knew Too Much. With a sountrack of cool ’50s jazz instead of  Bernard Herrmann’s agitated score, the breathtakingly-talented cast will frequently break into dance, or stylised movement, or even an incongruous lipsync to glorious tracks like Rita Pavone’s Heart or Peggy Lee’s Sans Souci – all in aid of changing the mood or location or time. 

Rob Howell‘s set is dominated by four huge hotel lobby revolving doors which are deployed to enclose some scenes or underscore the frantic spinning out of control of the adventure. Naturally, given that certain set pieces from the film have reached iconic status, the weight of expectation how this production will replicate those scenes looms large. While the Mount Rushmore episode never quite reaches those giddy heights, the ingenuity and inventiveness in recreating Thornhill’s attempt to escape the murderous cropduster attack is satisfyingly thrilling. When Katy Owen, whose Professor / Narrator is an irresistible, bravura comic triumph, exclaims “It’s a fireball” while waving a red handkerchief about, this reviewer cannot remember laughing quite so hard in a theatre for a long time. Truly bonkers!

For the most part, North By Northwest deservedly purrs, delighting in its own deliciousness and invention.  However the piece does begin suffer with the same issue that faces all fast-paced thrillers: the breathless momentum of following one scene hot on the heels of another is that inevitably you begin to run out of puff.

Added to that, Rice’s script changes the ending. Hitchcock’s abrupt finale follows the lovers kissing in a train carriage with a saucy visual entendre of the locomotive speeding into a tunnel. Instead this production attempts to weigh in with some global politicking and contemporary resonance. Despite Patrycja Kujawska‘s Eve Kendall having sewn the seeds earlier about the consequences of war and the personal toll it can take upon individuals, it feels like her post-narrative circumstance is tonally off and artificially bolted on to create a weightier ending. Its a scriptor-ex-machina intervention that Rice doesn’t pull off. 

However that eleventh hour hitch (pardon the pun) does not undo all the production’s exemplary good work. Wise Children’s North By Northwest is a theatrical riot of imagination, humour and dexterous performances. You’ll be mad to miss it. 

Sophisticated suspense and spills a-plenty –  ★★★★ 4 stars

North By Northwest Tour

North By Northwest runs at York Theatre Royal until 5th April

Then will tour to Manchester, Brighton, Liverpool, Bath, Cheltenham and London

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