HITCHOCK BLONDE: till 24 May

London

HITCHCOCK BLONDE
by Terry Johnson

Royal Court (Jerwood Theatre Downstairs) To 24 May 2003
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat Sat 3.30pm
Runs 2hr 45min One interval

TICKETS: 020 7565 5000
Review: Timothy Ramsden 26 April

Transfers to Lyric Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, from 25 June 2003.
Mon-Sat 730pm Mat Thu & Sat 3pm
TICKETS: 0870 8901107

Theatrically fascinating drama with some improbable characters.
A modern-day run-of-the-mill film lecturer and the woman student he lures to his Mediterranean summer home are as ill-matched as the characters in a Hitchcock thriller, only less believable. Alex is expert at film stock conservation but naff at human relationships, Nicola a glumly indifferent student with no idea in her head not clumped there by the flashiest aspects of the zeitgeist (The what?').

Ibiza's her summer destination, and she's knowing enough to realise Alex's motives for the alternative invite not that it's hard to pick up the danger-vibes in David Haig's usual taut-voiced, inner-fury style. No way would such a student be lured by undiscovered early Hitch home-movies, even with Hitch as her subject of study. She'd fake a smile, ask to see the video when it comes out, and sling her backpack Ibiza-wards.

As unconvincing is her later self-harming (the knife Motif from Hitch's final silent/first sound movie Blackmail plays across the three-part timespan) and her lines about women's love. They sound like half the truth: the half men congratulate themselves on perceiving, and which they find gratifying. Johnson's play is as male-voyeuristic as Hitch's films. And it's male-guilty in an emptily unconvincing, breast-beating way: like Hitch, Alex enjoys women as obscure objects of desire: both back off when intimacy offers. With Hitch the female threat is physical; with Alex emotional.

Hitchcock's blonde is a woman as perceived or created by a man (the film director had a taste for celluloid blondes) for whom intimacy's fine while it's a camera lens away. What Is striking about this play is the theatrical cross-cutting of Alex and Nicola with scenes forty years earlier where Hitch interviews a prospective body-double for Janet Leigh's Psycho shower-scene.

William Hootkins is generally kept in profile, where he's an excellent body-double himself, catching Hitchcock's vocal nuances superbly, and his mix of studied fastidiousness careful filleting of Dover sole with socially-unaware gluttony swallowing a pudding hole.

With fine modern video backdrops creating the present-day island, for 1959 a contrasting studio claustrophobia with lanterns casting shadows from above, and 1919 shown entirely on film, this is a handsome, suitably involved production. The script makes its points, but suggests Johnson is more fascinated by the complex play of ideas than by his characters as individuals.

1999:
Nicola: Fiona Glascott
Alex: David Haig
1959:
Hitch: William Hootkins
Blonde: Rosamund Pike
Husband: Owen McDonnelll
1919:
Blonde: Victoria Gay
Hitchcock: Alexander Delamere

Director: Terry Johnson
Designer: William Dudley
Lighting: Simon Corder
Sound: Ian Dickinson
Video realisation: Dick Straker, Sven Ortel for Mesmer
Video post-production and animation: Richard Kenyon
Make-up designer: Rosemarie Swinfield
Fight director: Terry King
Dialect coach: Jill McCullough
Company voice work: Patsy Rodenburg

2003-05-16 10:09:28