Only the very brave or the very foolhardy would dare to transpose Graham Greene's cold war thriller from page to stage when Carol Reed's celebrated 1949 film version is one of the most distinctive and memorable British movies of all time.
Still, Red Shift Theatre Company wouldn't have been one of the small-scale touring circuit's best advertisements for the last 20 years if it hadn't shown courage, and Jonathan Holloway's adaptation, which returns to Greene's original novel, gets to the heart of a story set in post-war divided Vienna, a shadowy stage where the protagonists play out their story of friendship, love and betrayal watched by many eyes.
Holloway's production is very good on atmosphere too and in Ross Brown's original music finds a sound that is as distinctive as Anton Karas' zither score in the movie. It also finds a link between Rolo Martins' westerns and the sense of this broken city teeming with black market raqueteers as a lawless frontier town where the values of the wild west prevail, with only the stiff upper lip British providing the cavalry and trying to play fair and decent.
But while Neil Irish's design with its cracked broken windows and projected images of imprisoning wire is effective at creating a mental map of the city as well as offering many different locations, it swizzles around so often that it soon becomes highly distracting, and as much a feature of the show as the actors. This may not be a bad thing as at this very early stage in the tour some of the performances are still unformed and under-powered.
Still by the second half, the production whips up a satisfying level of suspense and the company shows considerable flair in some of the staging - including the famous scene in the Ferris wheel.
· At Brewery Arts, Kendal on October 21 and 22, and touring.
