There’s a lot of interplay in All About Eve concerning theatre versus movies. (Ivo van Hove’s script here is adapted from the best-known version, the 1950 film, as well as the 1964 play The Wisdom Of Eve co-written by Mary Orr, who had also written the original short story of the same title in 1946... Anyway...) It therefore makes sense that there is a live video component to van Hove’s staging. Jan Versweyveld’s set begins as a puce box; the walls fly up to reveal an unmasked-off backstage from which props are brought on, and also a couple of upstage closets with windows through which video cameras periodically peep to feed footage of simultaneous “elsewhere” action on to large letterbox projections above the main acting area.

This works for matters such as goings-on in a different room at a party, or Eve’s secret reactions in her bathroom as devious critic Addison DeWitt, in her main hotel room, probes her lies and impostures. Sometimes it is overdone, as when the cameramen move centre-stage to circle a group having supper at a club. Once or twice the same split-attention technique is used without cameras or closets, as when we listen to actress Margo Channing and her dresser arguing upstage while watching Eve downstage, clutching Margo’s theatrical costume and taking fantasy curtain calls.

The two forms mesh most intimately, and most tellingly, in that a camera is mounted in the centre of the dressing-room mirror which is the most regularly used piece of furniture. We get to see, in extreme close-up, a masterclass in response acting from Gillian Anderson as Margo in the first phase, taking her stage make-up off as she is introduced to the supposedly starstruck fan Eve. Later, when Margo begins to believe (rightly) that Eve is studying her with a view to superseding her, a video effect reveals one reason for her fear by ageing the dressing-table image several decades; later still, when Eve has more or less succeeded in seizing stardom, her face in the mirror morphs into Margo’s, whom she has in effect become.

Whether on stage or screen, the story centres on stardom, and on how we look at stars, be they at work, at play or in only partially private life. What van Hove has done is tell a tale about gaze in a way which exercises, torques and, yes, manipulates our own gaze as viewers. I can’t help wondering how this will translate on its live-to-cinemas screening in a few weeks.

It is not just the screen-to-stage transition but the passage of 70 years in audience tastes which makes most of the performances more emotionally explicit than their film originals. Where Bette Davis was corrosive as Margo, Anderson is magnificently glacial until her ice shatters; where Anne Baxter’s cinematic Eve was quietly calculating, Lily James shows a little more of the schemer, with a faint whiff once or twice of stalker/psycho. No-one could be as urbane as George Sanders, but Stanley Townsend as Addison DeWitt is as smoothly devastating as all too many folk believe us critics to be, or at least to wish we were. The thematic musings are never obtrusive; if you thread them together, fine, and if not it’s still an excellently told newcomer/usurper yarn. And who knows, the play might yet emulate the film’s own glimpse of future stardom, in which a cameo of a desperate wannabe is played by a young, all but unnoticeable Marilyn Monroe.

Written for the Financial Times.