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Director Emma Rice has successfully adapted The Red Shoes, Brief Encounter and the Buddha of Suburbia for the stage, among many others, but I thought Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 thriller would surely defeat her. The film is a series of widescreen set pieces – the UN building, the cropduster plane chase, the Mount Rushmore denouement – hung on the slenderest MacGuffin: slick ad-man Roger O Thornhill is mistaken for a government agent who doesn’t exist.
I’d reckoned without the scrappy inventiveness and impish spirit of Rice, working here with her company Wise Children and a host of co-producers, and occupying the atmospherically decayed theatre at Ally Pally. North by Northwest becomes an arch, handmade pastiche of the movie’s sense of dislocation and paranoia, from the moment Ewan Wardrop’s Thornhill bops onto the stage to Simon Baker’s soundtrack of noirish, dulcimer-heavy jazz, surrounded by a six-strong ensemble wearing the trenchcoat-and-trilby uniform of Cold War spies.
Four giant revolving doors studded with liquor bottles stand in for the skyscrapers, grand homes and public spaces Thornhill passes through: North by Northwest is a study in hectic forward motion. Locations and modes of transport are announced with cards pasted onto the side of suitcases (“Chicago Station”, “Greyhound bus”) and a cliff edge is built out of luggage.
Rice and designer Rob Howell delight in distortions of scale: one bag opens to contain a library, another a mini-Rushmore: meanwhile small props like a matchbook or notepad are replicated in magnified size so we can all see. The cornfield is represented by two rolled and torn tubes of paper, the plane appearing on a single banner when it’s distant, then on three banners when it’s suddenly close enough to part Thornhill’s hair.
Wardrop wears a silver-grey suit like Cary Grant in the movie but wisely doesn’t attempt any emulation beyond that. His Thornhill is a doofus, who delivers the cringier dialogue with an apologetic sidelong glance. (“I’m a big girl,” says Patrycja Kujawska’s Eve in the famous train seduction scene. “In all the right places,” he smirks.)
The cast lip-synch to hits of the 50s and perform enthusiastic but unpolished choreography. Much of the movement is clownish, acrobatic or exaggerated, the accents clotted. It’s implied in the film that the villains Vandamm and Leonard are covertly gay: Leonard, renamed Valerian, is thoroughly outed here.
How you respond to the show will largely depend on how you react to a stalwart of Rice’s productions, Katy Owen. A tiny figure given to enormous performances, she here growls and gurns, limps and spasms as a catch-all spymaster-ringmaster-narrator. She lobs in dollops of audience participation (“let’s all say it together”) and cameos as a twittering society housewife and an inexplicably Welsh bellboy too.
At first I found this onslaught of caterwauling thespianism unbearable; by the end I was thoroughly enjoying it. You don’t go to Rice’s shows for subtlety but for heartfelt, let’s-just-try it exuberance and invention.
There are many things here that don’t work. Hitchcock’s tricksy match-cut ending, where peril segues into wedded bliss, is impossible on stage, so Rice cobbles together some incoherent thoughts about world peace and the days of American internationalism. The fights are repetitive and the lip-synching gets quickly old.
But the benchmark for any adaptation from one medium to another is that it becomes something new in the process: and Rice makes North by Northwest messily but utterly her own.
Alexandra Palace Theatre, to June 22; alexandrapalace.com
