There’s an art to adaptation across
media, in finding a golden mean between fidelity to the existing work,
bringing out its underlying themes and concerns, and striking out in an
original direction. Leonard Cohen’s song lyrics based on poems by Lorca
and Cavafy manage it beautifully; John Huston’s film of James Joyce’s
short story
The Dead is
another excellent example; and now Huston’s grandson Jack stars in a
further instance. Craig Warner’s play
Strangers
On A Train is officially “based on the novel by Patricia
Highsmith”, but it nods also to the Alfred Hitchcock film version
(scripted by Raymond Chandler), and effectively –
extremely effectively – recycles
Zola’s
Thérèse Raquin in a
homosocial incarnation for its final phase.
Those familiar with the film, in which charming psychopath Bruno meets
conscientious but malleable Guy by chance on a train and suggests that
they each kill the thorn in the other’s side, may be surprised to find
that here, as in the novel, Guy caves in and fulfils his half of the
“bargain”. Even those who know the novel will find the conclusion
unfamiliar, with the two men effectively locked in a coupling of mutual
recrimination and despair. This has, as I say, a more classical
antecedent, but Warner makes it work beautifully. Huston and director
Robert Allan Ackerman also settle on a more recent allusion, which is
again borne out by the material: once you have Bruno pinned as an
effete, alcoholic southern momma’s boy, it is entirely natural that he
should look like Tennessee Williams.
Huston plays Bruno superbly, without a single hint of psycho cackling
but rather as a comprehensive believer in his own abilities and
personal magnetism, until his terminal illness suddenly sets in. As
Guy, Laurence Fox quickly finds himself caught as if in the cobwebs of
Peter Wilms’ stage projections and either crumbles quietly or cries in
desolation rather than fragmenting more ostentatiously. Miranda Raison
gives strong support as Guy’s wife, and Imogen Stubbs turns up the
blowsiness as Bruno’s mother. Even the incidental music sounds like
Hitchcock’s favourite composer Bernard Herrmann (in fact, there being
no programme credit for it, it may in fact
be a Herrmann score, although he
did not work on the film of
Strangers).
Like Bruno’s insinuations, the power and compulsion of the play build
slowly until you realise too late that you are altogether ensnared.
Written for the Financial
Times.