North By Northwest

Since its premiere by the Melbourne Theatre Company in June 2015, this stage adaptation of Alfred Hitchcock’s classic sixties chase-movie has successfully played around the world in Canada and the UK. An obvious crowd-pleaser, Carolyn Burns’ treatment sticks very close to Ernest Lehman’s screenplay (perhaps a little too close) in putting this mistaken identity spy escapade on stage.

Stolen negatives and a femme-fatale feature in the plot which sees Manhattan advertising executive Roger Thornhill, kidnapped, shot at, and chased, in a series of impossible situations but in the end of course he still gets the girl.

This is all captured on a brilliant scaffolding set designed by director Simon Phillips and Nick Schlieper (who also did double duty as the lighting designer), Bernard Herrimann’s iconic Hollywood score, and some video projections with the actors filming miniature models on chroma key set-ups at either side of the stage. It’s all kind of hokey and melodramatic, but isn’t that the point? Some effects like the crop-duster sequence don’t really pay-off, but other like the faces on Mount Rushmore are clever and provoke laughs.

Matt Day gives a solid and likeable performance of Thornhill. He’s not Cary Grant (who is?), but he manages to inject believability into the dialogue which at times walks the fine line between reality and parody. Amber McMahon as Eve, the blonde bombshell, looks like she just stepped out of an episode of Mad Men and adds some nice sexual chemistry to her seduction scene. The ensemble, all actors of calibre, have little chance to create more that caricatures of a multiple range of roles. Fortunately they don’t descend into the funny hats and voices farce of The Thirty Nine Steps, but they should be applauded for making more out of little. It might be gimmick theatre, but it entertains and will please many.

Peter Pinne