Criterion
Theatre, London W1
Opened 20 September, 2006
***
When Patrick Barlow's agreeably daft
stage adaptation (of Alfred Hitchcock's film version in 1935 more than
of John Buchan's novel from twenty years earlier) opened at the
Tricycle last month, my colleague Sarah Hemming's enjoyment was
tempered by the observation that the show was "sometimes too taken with
its own ingenuity". On seeing its West End transfer, this sense weighed
more and more heavily on me as the evening progressed.
Barlow (who does not appear in this show) is principally known as the
prime mover behind the National Theatre of Brent, whose propensity for
tackling huge subjects is radically, comically at odds with the fact
that there are only two of them onstage. But the laughs – and the
paradoxical, unexpected emotional success – with the NTB come not
solely from a playing style that left-field maestro Ken Campbell calls
"doing it crappily". We also see Barlow's character, Desmond Olivier
Dingle, and his assistant Raymond Box interacting with each other
outside the main framework of the show; we get, as it were, a
back-story to the principal shambles. That is missing here: there is
nothing between the story and the cast. So when, early in the show, the
dashing hero Richard Hannay remarks, "Hello, there's the telephone" two
seconds before it rings, we chuckle; but when matters build to the
point where the actors holding a billowing blue silk to represent a
stream are told to hold it lower so that the two leads can cross it,
the remark comes not from Hannay, nor from actor Charles Edwards, but
there is no third option – no "Desmond Dingle" to stand between Edwards
and Hannay.
Without that dimension, it simply looks as if the cast of four are not
respecting the story they tell. Yet a key element to the intended
appeal of the show is that such clean-cut heroes engaging in ventures
of derring-do (here, Hannay flees a mistaken murder charge and unmasks
a pre-war espionage ring) may be quaint but they still strike a genuine
chord with us. Maria Aitken's production plays both the small-scale
humour and the discreet series of Hitchcock references with skill, but
it has mislaid the heart of the tale.