Review by Simon Jenner, May 14th 2025
Wearers of CIA macs perform slinky shuffles, the Cold War is sent up as hot gossip. If Alfred Hitchcock is known for his humour, director Emma Rice of the company Wise Children has produced some extraordinary work here which can’t keep that humour out. Hitchcock’s 1959 film North by Northwest (written by Ernest Lehman) has Hitchcock’s tongue placed so firmly in his cheek that a treatment by Rice should prove an ideal match.
Photo Credit: Steve Tanner.
The first evening was packed, and the plentiful laughter added to the heat of the occasion. Someone has already used the phrase “Carry on Hitch” but it’s so apt that I repeat it. For entertainment value this is Rice’s most determined crowd-puller yet, and perhaps the most multi-talented, certainly hard-working cast (of six) that she has directed.
That though, might prove the punch Rice pulls or certainly doesn’t follow through with fully. We lose the balance of thriller laced with humour for slapstick draped like an outsize Pierrot over a scarecrow plot. A determined summer soufflé, it’s the closest Rice comes to another aesthetic, and another Hitchcock stage classic, Patrick Barlow’s The 39 Steps. But there is more fourth-wall intervention here and Rice determinedly guys the original.
Sometimes Rice’s refashioning touches the sublime, like Brief Encounter with Kneehigh, and latterly with Wise Children on works such as The Flying Lovers Of Vitebsk about painter Marc Chagall or her Cornwall-inspired Tristan and Yseult. At other times, Rice’s remodels don’t carry the charge they should, as in Kneehigh’s Rebecca, or Wise Children’s 2022 Wuthering Heights.
There are huge compensations of course. The narrator – “Professor” character Katy Owen in the outstanding performance of the evening – punctures fourth walls in so many places you expect the audience to be invited up to plug the gaps. We are certainly exhorted to shout back as if this were panto. Owen, with more than a touch of Kathryn Hunter about her, has impressed before; she was superb in Wuthering Heights. Here, her gravelly CIA winks and nods to a less innocent age are what stitch the storyline. (Even if it resembles the original, say, like those outsize stitches on the body of Frankenstein’s monster.) Owen is hardly ever offstage.
Photo Credit: Steve Tanner.
As Owen intones, “It would be strange, would it not, if, in a city of seven million people, one man were never mistaken for another…” Advertising executive Roger Thornhill (an excellent wide-eyed but resourceful Ewan Wardrop) is actually mistaken for someone nobody has ever seen because he raises his hand at a crucial moment to send a telegram. Soon he’s kidnapped, escapes by crashing a car when force-fed brandy, pleads his cause to the police and his hand-bagging mother (this is something no-one has quite explored) before escaping on a train. You’ll know the rest.
Wardrop plays his Cary Grant character relatively straight, and though riven with humour, keeps the plot’s balance like Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps cameo of the waiter holding his tray aloft as half the cast rush past him.
Wardrop’s onstage chemistry with Patrycja Kujawska, as enigmatic Eve Kendall, balances flirtation with intrigue, again like a perilously-served tray of gin and tonic which here does at least get served. Beyond her slinky red and black number, Kujawska is made up to look a little like a young Hilary Clinton, and there is a new reason for that. Kujawska too exudes a relatively straight, slightly bent person, drawling mystery.
Simon Oskarsson revels as a now homoerotically-charged Valerian and bamboozled police officer. His shifting accents work harder than anyone else’s; there are rapid costume changes and wild dance breaks where he proves the most versatile cast member. Mirabelle Gremaud is implacable as Anna, so it’s moving to discover where her character’s feelings lie. This is a moment in which the production brushes sentiment. That is true too of Karl Queensborough who as Phillip Vandamm invokes James Mason.
Photo Credit: Steve Tanner.
Photo Credit: Steve Tanner.
If there is a little Operation Mincemeat in the tone of this production, it’s that tongue-in-cheek homage to Patrick Barlow’s also tongue-in-cheek The 39 Steps that lodges in the mind, and at so many points. Barlow’s production though knows exactly what it is – it has self-awareness. Rice’s isn’t so certain. With more winks to a 2025 time scheme, there is more determined critique of the original’s core values.
Malcolm Rippeth’s lighting is almost engaged in a witty dialogue with Rob Howell’s towering set design, a series of revolving doors laced on their sills with liqueur bottles. It’s quite breath-taking; every time these revolves descend, a feeling of a world-class production rises. A UN murder scene with jabbering operators and the luckless hero photo-finished with a guilty knife is a stand-out. When these doors are removed everything from a crop-dusting plane in three panels and an exploding oil tanker to chilly mountains are superbly invoked. All this is done in light displays and with the benefit of one explosion. There is dry ice and an elegant swirl of props.
The one slight let-down is the climax on Mount Rushmore. Elsewhere one might want a touch more emotional heft, a touch less spectacle. Here we get the former where it’s needed, but it’s difficult to see how even Rice could re-engineer both spectacle and danger.
Simon Baker’s idiomatic compositions and sound design combine with classics by Peggy Lee, Ella Fitzgerald and Cole Porter. The cast breathe physical comedy, and often in gender-reversals, lip-synch Baker’s music. Their routines are set to jazz shuffles with humorous – if relentless – choreography by Etta Murfitt. Every bit of that is masterly even though its repeat mixes can unbalance the production. This only palled halfway through Act Two. Throughout the two and a half hours, I was still riveted.
At the end Rice suddenly recalls that there was a bit of seriousness in all this – though if we don’t take the CIA as good guys now, nor did Hitch. After faithfully slapsticking the plot in the face, Rice slaps on seriousness at the end. The result is that we lose a great Hitchcock image. And I would have loved to see Rice pull that off.
Good luck with discovering the cast. They deserve better than the fiddly fetish of QR codes. A small cast/creatives sheet would suffice for those who would like to credit hard-working actors. I was forced to scramble around websites. Wise Children’s own site gave nothing away save the images we weren’t provided with.
I would give a lot, if not my soul, to see a conversation with Hitchcock and Rice about the limits of humour. I wouldn’t have missed this though. There’s nothing like this in Rice’s work; and nothing resembling it will arrive for another two years or so.
This review first appeared in Plays International & Europe, to whom grateful acknowledgment is made for reproducing it here.
Photo Credit: Steve Tanner.
