Emma Rice has been adapting the unadaptable for so long that it really comes as no surprise that she’s now turned her sights on Alfred Hitchcock’s classic 1959 thriller North By Northwest, simply because it feels like there’s no source material she could choose that would shock us anymore. Starring Cary Grant in one of his great roles, North By Northwest is a relatively light hearted but magnificently relentless thriller that follows Roger Thornhill, an advertising executive who gets mistaken for a spy who doesn’t actually exist, and consequestly gets sucked into an improbably convoluted conspiracy that takes him the length and breadth of the United States and famously involves him being attacked by a crop duster armed with machine gun.
Rice’s production has a cast of just six and no budget for a real crop duster, but these are not the sort of things that have ever bothered the imaginative and irreverant Rice – reports from the tour suggests a typically giddy show that understandably plays up the comedic side of Hitchcock’s story.
