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 because she does it on her own terms: she doesn’t really bother with the action stuff that much, instead revelling in the story, which features bland nobody Roger getting sucked into a mountingly ridiculous conspiracy, the absurdities of which are enhanced by its untethering from those big pulse-pounding setpieces
Not that Rice’s production lacks thrills: Rob Howell’s flexible set – basically made up of four ’50s New York-style revolving doors – is very effective on the more intimate sections, particularly Roger’s early abduction and his tense train journey to Chicago. And the cropduster scene is so obviously beyond the technical scope of the production that it’s simply fun that Rice has a go, in adorably lo-fi fashion. The whole story is here, but the emphasis has been changed.
And it’s tremendous fun, a gleefully Ricean homage to Hitchcock, spy thrillers and generally cool things about ’50s America. But then it hits a wall at what should be the most thrilling point. The final confrontation at Mount Rushmore just doesn’t work. A pile of suitcases stands in for the monument and it sort of scans in a lo-fi theatre style, but the frantic action is hard to follow in such a confined playing area. Plus the tone becomes abruptly more earnest, which feels almost like a cop out. The trouble is North by Northwest does pretty much depend on Hitchcock’s exact climax, and that simply can’t be delivered here. I wouldn’t say Rice has bitten off more than she can chew: but I would say that a lack of punch to the grand finale is a trade off for the larks we’ve had up to that point.
