It’s impossible to discuss this production without spoilers, but I suspect my press-night companion is the only person in the western world not to have seen the classic Alfred Hitchcock film, so forgive me for being loose-lipped. The question in everyone’s mind (except my friend’s) was surely “How the hell do you adapt this for the stage?” The two most memorable sequences in the 1959 film are both chases. In the first, protagonist Roger Thornhill, an advertising executive being mistakenly pursued as a secret agent, flees through an isolated field of maize from a crop-dusting, or rather machine-gunning, biplane; in the climactic episode Thornhill and his love interest clamber across the face, or rather faces, of Mount Rushmore. Not the sort of action easily reproducible in a medium-sized Georgian playhouse.

Director and co-designer Simon Phillips, who first staged this adaptation in his erstwhile base of Melbourne, takes his twin cues from theatre and film respectively. As in that recent theatrical success based on another Hitchcock “wrong man” film, The 39 Steps, the effects are made obvious... though unlike that other play, North By Northwest neither sounds a note of cheerful making-do nor pokes fun at the material. This is pastiche, not parody. (It follows Ernest Lehman’s screenplay almost verbatim and uses Bernard Herrmann’s urgent musical score; there’s even a quasi-Hitchcock fat-bald-man cameo.)

The crucial element, though, is a technique once standard in film though now generally considered outdated. On each side of the stage is a little booth with a video camera, in which chroma-key effects are created for projection upstage: one booth works in blue-screen matte, the other in red-. Tabletop models and pictures form both static and moving backgrounds... they even re-create the classic whirling-newspaper effect, and the Rushmore faces are provided by supporting actors in extreme close-up.

However clever the staging, though, the chief delight here is in seeing the film made over. The principal performers have invidious tasks: it is impossible not to keep recalling Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason and Martin Landau. But if they can’t reproduce their originals’ lightness of touch, Jonathan Watton and his fellows do strike that other lightness, of overall tone, which balances the thriller element with such mastery.

Written for the Financial Times.