Well, that was fun.
Emma Rice’s stage adaptation of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 movie from a script by Ernest Lehman is a pleasure from beginning to end. Even more so if you know the movie, because much of the pleasure is in watching how this intrepid team of actors tackle what would seem to be unstageable filmic set pieces. I give you the crop duster plane attack on Cary Grant in the middle of the prairie for one.
This is Wise Children’s shtick, taking well-known stories and telling them in a highly original way. It’s risky, and it doesn’t always work. I thought their spoof on Mallory Towers missed the mark, but in this production the company are bang on form. Six actors create a cast of 20, they dance, they sing, they mime (hilariously) to recordings of songs from the 50s – the first of these stops the show in act one – they move in peculiar ways, and they tell this complicated story with perfect clarity.
Simon Oskarsson, Katy Owen and Ewan Wardrop in North by Northwest. Credit Steve Tanner.
In a case of mistaken identity, New York advertising exec Roger Thornhill, a dapper, handsome Ewan Wardrop in the Cary Grant part, is taken by the villain’s henchpersons, Valerian, a smooth and dangerous Simon Oskarsson and an equally dangerous Mirabelle Gremaud, to be the enigmatic secret agent George Kaplan. They kidnap him from the lobby of a big New York hotel and deliver him to a sumptuous house in the suburbs to be interviewed by chief villain Phillip Vandamm, a reserved and suitably English – given he is in the James Mason part – Karl Queensborough. Thornhill pleads innocence, the baddies are unimpressed, and it looks like it’s curtains for Roger, except he escapes! It is all downhill from there, literally.
As the plot thickens we meet Eve Kendall, a poised and determined Patrycja Kujawska, who rescues our hero from the imminent clutches of the police and finds herself in the middle of all this intrigue. Or does she? You’ll have to go to find out. We are led through the maze by The Professor, an impatient yet paternal Katy Owen, perfect in the Leo G. Carroll part, who trusts no one, especially not the audience.
It’s a romp, and it fairly trucks along, and you do have to keep your wits about you. But the team, four of whom have worked with Wise Children and its predecessor Knee High before, manage the quick changes, the set (which consists of four large wood and glass revolving doors of the kind my six-year-old nephew got trapped in coming out of Macy’s last year), and a bewildering array of suitcases with apparent ease. Rice directs with a confident hand, and designer Rob Howell and sound designer and composer Simon Baker have served the production very well. The person I want to meet is the choreographer and movement director Etta Murfitt. Where on earth does she get these ideas?
By Chris Wallis, Theatre Editor
Main image: Katy Owen and Ewan Wardrop in North by Northwest. Credit Steve Tanner.
North by Northwest is at Manchester’s HOME until May 10, 2025, then it’s off to Liverpool Playhouse from May 20-24, 2025. More information in the links below.
