North by Northwest
Obviously Hitchcock’s North by Northwest is a ludicrous film to adapt for the stage, especially for a modestly budgeted touring show with no set changes and a cast of seven. As much as anything else, Alfred Hitchcock’s absurdist conspiracy thriller is best remembered for two of the most audacious setpieces in cinema history: an attack by a machine gun-toting crop duster plane on an Illinois cornfield, and a final showdown on top of Mount Rushmore.
But whimsical auteur Emma Rice has long abandoned any fear of adapting impossible source material. She doesn’t attempt to faithfully recreate a given film or book so much as drag it into her own private dimension, where it’s forced to play by her rules.
North by Northwest is an interesting choice nonetheless, because it’s so hard to classify. Despite its huge impact on the genre, it’s not really an action film. And it’s not really a comedy. But there’s a definite twinkle in its eyes as it follows Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant in the film, Ewan Wardrop here), a mediocre middle-aged adman who gets dragged into an elaborate conspiracy after being mistaken for George Caplan, a spy who does not in fact exist.
Arguably Rice disrupts a delicate equilibrium by making it overtly comic, with dance sequences, miming to ’50s pop hits, and a spectacularly knowing, fourth wall-breaking performance from Katy Owen as shadowy spymaster The Professor, who serves as the show’s narrator and tour guide.
It’s jarring at first, but Rice pulls it off...
