When Daphne du Maurier’s novel, which she subtitled “a study in jealousy”, was published in 1938, it was an instant critical and commercial success, leading one reviewer to observe: “Criticising the work of Daphne du Maurier is rather like finding fault with hot buttered toast. It’s more profitable and more interesting to consider why it goes down so well.”
You might say the same about the work of Emma Rice, who is both adapter and director of this thrilling, almost hallucinatory stage version seen through the eyes of the novel’s young and inexperienced new Mrs de Winter, who in her husband’s Cornish manor house, Manderley, feels that she is constantly in the shadow of her glamorous predecessor, Rebecca. With Kneehigh, Rice has created a string of hits, and she is now artistic director designate of Shakespeare’s Globe. There are interesting times ahead.
Rebecca plays to all Rice’s strengths, operating at a point where the real and the dream, the conscious and the unconscious, intersect. The show reframes female experience and how we perceive women and, like her earlier West End success, Brief Encounter, Rice finds the heart-stopping passion in a familiar story but also adds her own comic touches. Katy Owen’s phone-obsessed teenage servant is a total delight.
Rice has often been at her most potent when dealing with fairytales, and there is a strong element of that here in a production where the second Mrs de Winter (Imogen Sage) is like a sleeping beauty in a house stalled in time. But, in this instance, Sleeping Beauty must shake herself awake from fear and passivity, and it’s she who does the saving, rescuing Maxim de Winter (Tristan Sturrock) from himself and Rebecca’s curse. The absent Rebecca is a dark fairy, and Emily Raymond’s Mrs Danvers is her handmaiden, exuding a whiff of something malevolent in her obsessive loyalty.
The real star of the show is Leslie Travers’ design, offering a space where house and beach meet and where past, present and future coil around each other like the smoke that eventually engulfs the house. Rice uses the space brilliantly, offering an image of Rebecca like a drowned mermaid, and turning Manderley into a rocky obstacle course and a place where the louche and the elegant, popular culture and snobbery, freedom and imprisonment, all co-exist.
There are touches of sheer brilliance: the intercutting of the discovery of Rebecca’s body with a sea shanty, sung by a Greek chorus of fisherman, should diminish the tension of the scene but heightens it. This is a finely judged evening of high jinks and shivers.
• At Oxford Playhouse, 16-21 November. Box office: 01865 305305. Then touring.
