Dominic Hill has a Macbeth fixation. In the past 18 months, the director has staged the Shakespeare play, the Verdi opera and Alfred Jarry's scatological reworking, Ubu the King. In this context, it's hard not to see Tom Ripley, the psychotic antihero of Patricia Highsmith's novel, as a kind of 1950s Macbeth, resorting to murder every time his hermetic mental kingdom comes under threat.
Certainly, in the second half of Phyllis Nagy's adaptation (which slightly predates the Matt Damon movie), a bloodied Keith Fleming looks just like Banquo's ghost haunting the stage as the murdered playboy Richard Greenleaf. Or rather, the stage haunts him, because nothing can unsettle the emotionless calm of Paul Thomas Hickey's chilling Ripley. Greenleaf can only look helplessly on from beyond his watery grave as his old friend assumes his identity and rewrites history.
This is a dark version of the story, with none of the sheen of the film: it is more concerned with the psychological motives of a man like Ripley who, lacking a personality of his own, adapts chameleon-like to the characters of others. To explain his behaviour, Nagy offers us a background of domestic abuse and the habitual camouflage of repressed homosexuality. Ripley is a shell of a character, soulless and cynical, believing that "vulnerability is something other people exploit" and proceeding to do all the exploiting himself.
Hickey has a tough job: not only must he play a morally cold role, with little to endear him to the audience, but he never once leaves the stage. He performs with fluency and conviction, capturing the poise of a man born to think on his feet, but there is something wearing about his relentless drive and necessary lack of emotional development. Where the film had the tension of a thriller, here there are too few near-misses and narrow escapes to make Ripley's success audacious as well as creepy.
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