North by Northwest: A bravura staging that will keep you grinning at its sheer inventiveness

Telegraph

27-03-2025

Of all the films to stage, Alfred Hitchcock's 1959 thriller North by Northwest – with its set pieces featuring trains, planes, automobiles, and Mouth Rushmore – is not a screechingly obvious choice. As adapted and directed by Emma Rice, this new touring Wise Children production inevitably goes for larky, knowing stagecraft and theatrical silliness over big-budget special effects: the crop-dusting bi-plane is made of waving banners and an aerosol can, while a big wobbly pile of suitcases mount up for Rushmore. Phones appear out of pockets, labelled suitcases remind us where we are and who each character is, and there's some panto-style audience interaction to make sure we're following the twisty plot ('You're going to need to be on the ball to keep up with this story!')
Rice cleverly draws out the theatricality inherent within a movie that's so much about the sustained role-playing of espionage. Our baffled hero, ad man Roger Thornhill, suffers positively Shakespearean levels of mistaken identity when he's incorrectly identified as an American secret agent – and must endlessly attempt to escape being captured or murdered by a shadowy (and here, notably Russian-accented) foreign spy gang. But Thornhill's feelings for Eve, a classic Hitchcock icy blonde who helpfully hides him on a train, soon complicate matters…
If the script follows the film mostly beat-for-beat, the mood is generally more Rice-esque than Hitchcockian: a spy caper with the emphasis on capering, rather than suspense or thrills. And there are moments, such as the teetering-off-a-mountain finale, that really can't translate – not helped by Rice waiting for the denouement to crowbar in some under-developed and earnest back stories for the villains, by which time it's too late for us really to care. But mostly, this production is a heck of a lot of fun – a bravura staging that will keep you grinning at its inventiveness.
A heroic cast of six play umpteen suitcase-swapping roles with wit and swagger. Soundtracked not by Bernard Herrmann's high-drama score but by a slinkier backdrop of lounge jazz, the cast shimmy, sway, and soft-shoe around Rob Howell's gorgeous set of extra-tall revolving doors. Amid gliding dance routines, the actors lip-sync to 1950s numbers – Get Happy, Orange Coloured Sky – which can animate trickier to stage sequences too. A drunk-driving car chase, or sexy seduction in a train carriage? There's a song and dance for that. (The music's volume could go up a touch, mind.)
Ewan Wardrop is reliably entertaining in the Cary Grant role of Thornhill – even if it's impossible to wipe the great man entirely from one's memory while watching – while Patrycja Kujawska's Eve is more soulful than seductive in the role made famous by Eva Maria Saint. The virtuoso multi-rolling by the rest of the cast is always a blast to watch, but arguably leaves a character such as Vandamm – the James Mason villain of the film, here played by Karl Queenborough – feeling only lightly sketched.
The real star of the show is the remarkable, chameleonic comic talent of one of Rice's regulars, Katy Owen. She plays the Professor, an intelligence boss here speaking like an old-guard British officer with ripe RP – and is also our narrator. The Professor helps chivvy the convoluted story of double-crossings along, as well as occasionally alluding to the post-war trauma everyone is suffering amid this 'global battle for security' – words to induce a shudder, even in this most enjoyable of evenings.