As fictional antiheroes go, Patricia Highsmith’s deliciously amoral Tom Ripley is simply irresistible.
First crushing on, then crushing, sneering dilettante Dickie Greenleaf, Ripley casually assumes his identity (and careless wealth). We should be repulsed by such a repugnant character. Instead, we mentally egg him on.
Why? A lot of his inexplicable appeal has to do with class. When we first meet Ripley in Highsmith’s 1955 novel, he’s cruising seedy New York bars, on the lam from cops and debtors pursuing him for petty theft and fraud charges. A man down on his luck, we understand his hustle.
Jumping at shadows, the appearance of an impeccably dressed Greenleaf senior, Herbert, startles Ripley. Is the older man an unusually well-dressed detective, or even, *gasp*, a “pervert”?
Crashing through the class barrier, Ripley seizes on Herbert’s presumptuous approach with an offer too good to resist: an impossibly well-paid gig, tasked with retrieving Herbert’s recalcitrant son from fictional Italian beach town, Mongibello
How could Ripley say no? Once there, how could he let go? A provocation to seize a world well beyond his means.
Better the devil we know, we’re on Ripley’s side as he claims his slice of this indulgent life from mean-spirited one percenters. After all, Highsmith borrows Mongibello from the Italian for active volcano Mount Etna, and Ripley’s here to blow shit up.
Who’s involved in this latest adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley?
The suspenseful, smoky bar-enshrouded opening gambit outlined above was cut from both René Clément’s Alain Delon-led 1960 film Plein Soleil, AKA Purple Noon, and by Anthony Minghella’s magnificent 1999 version with Matt Damon and Jude Law.
It’s reinstated in this new Sydney Theatre Company adaptation by celebrated playwright Joanna Murray-Smith, who previously explored the end of Highsmith’s life in Switzerland. Directed by Sarah Goodes, The Talented Mr Ripley transfers to Arts Centre Melbourne with a key cast change.
Heartbreak High star Will McDonald remains our inherently queer, ever-so-slippery Ripley, wonderfully so, all cut-glass cheeks and wily sneaks. A revelatory Roman Delo steps into Dickie’s well-heeled shoes, previously worn by Raj Labade in the Sydney run.
Andrew McFarlane, handsomely coiffed, is our huffing, puffing Herbert, a man used to throwing money at his problems. As snappy as a Howard Hawks heroine, Claude Scott-Mitchell cuts a fine dash as Dickie’s permanently suspicious Marge Sherwood. It’s an unbridled delight to see her go toe-to-toe with McDonald, testing Ripley’s lies.
Later, we’ll meet the fabulous Faisal Hamza as bully boy toff Freddie Miles, not quite surpassing Philip Seymour Hoffman but giving it a red-hot go. And a spirited Johnny Nasser injects comic charm into the sleuthing, though always two steps behind, Inspector Rolverini, who doggedly pursues our Ripley.
All but McDonald briefly dip in and out of other roles, cannily playing up the story’s focus on tactically code-shifting identity.
How well does the STC show realise the wicked world of The Talented Mr. Ripley?
While the big empty box approach drained a little life from director Sarah Goodes’ Heide-set drama Sunday, it works a treat here precisely because the oppressively empty, storm-grey staging of set designer Elizabeth Gadsby is as mercurially shifting as Ripley’s racing mind.
It’s closing in on him when Herbert tracks him down, then bursts into sunburnt colour on arrival in Mongibello, thanks to lighting designer Damien Cooper’s savvy choices and Gadsby’s explosion of twirling parasols, beer carts and Hamza, Nasser and Delo’s bronzed bodies.
Our sympathies for Ripley, raised when he won the golden ticket, only increase in the face of Dickie and Marge’s snooty needling, nitpicking at his poor man’s clothes and lack of polish.
A flurry of fourth wall-breaking stagehands whisk props in and out, so one minute we’re roasting on the sand, the next luxuriating in a Venetian palazzo. When the vast and chintzy crown of a beaded chandelier drops, along with an electrically anachronistic beat from composer and sound designer Steve Franci, we’re in a Roman club where aching homoerotic promise, so cruelly dashed, ignites in disco lights between Ripley and Dickie.
Even the smallest moments shine, like when a rear door through which the cast come and go somehow harnesses Narnia powers to unfold into a wardrobe revealing a battalion of Dickie’s powder pink blazers, leather loafers and floaty beige chinos. A fetishist’s paradise in which Ripley’s caught red-handed, trying it on and kissing the mirror image of him as his forbidden obsession.
When the set’s grey walls shimmer and come alive again, this time with the reflected light of lapping blue waves, we all hold our breath as Ripley and Dickie take a fateful rowing boat out to sea on their boys’ trip to San Remo. As Ripley cuts loose, a flash of scarlet slicing across a plunging oar, there’s a magnificent moment of stagecraft. Delo’s Dickie hangs halfway between heaven and hell, and it’s swell.
How close is this take to Highsmith’s book, The Talented Mr. Ripley?
Very! From that reintroduced bar hop on, Murray-Smith’s spin on Ripley’s aspirational sin honours Highsmith’s novel.
So the role of shoulder to cry on, Peter – greatly expanded to tragic effect in the Minghella movie, as played by Jack Davenport – receives only a fleeting mention here, as he only had a small, though perfectly formed, role in the novel.
There’s deliberate mischief in where Murray-Smith chooses to cut the action. As a gaudy green ashtray comes into play for a second time, it leaves another character’s fate dangling in the air in such a way that even the snuff-happy Highsmith didn’t dare (though she certainly teased it and us).
Who will like The Talented Mr. Ripley?
Wonderfully corralled by Goodes, a nimbly alight cast and cleverly deployed crew, this is a spectacularly staged show that should appeal to anyone with a taste for the devious, diabolical and determined, whether familiar with Ripley’s wicked game or not.
Sometimes it’s rewarding, rooting for a very bad man when the system he’s bludgeoning is even worse. So dive on in, the water’s ever so inviting.
The Talented Mr. Ripley is at Arts Centre Melbourne, St Kilda Road, now until November 23. Book tickets here.
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