Latest news with #WiseChildren
Yahoo
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Emma Rice brings Hitchcock comedy-thriller to Bath stage
EMMA Rice's new stage adaptation of Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest is being staged in Bath. The production, which is part of a UK tour, will be at the Theatre Royal Bath from May 27 to May 31. Director Emma Rice has reimagined the classic thriller as a comedy. The story follows Roger Thornhill, a man who is mistaken for someone else and finds himself caught up in a Cold War conspiracy. The production features a cast of six actors, backed by a 1950s soundtrack. The cast includes Ewan Wardrop as Roger Thornhill, Mirabelle Gremaud as Anna, Patrycja Kujawska as Eva Kendall, Simon Oskarsson as Valerian, Katy Owen as The Professor, and Karl Queensborough as Philip Vandamm. Emma Rice, who adapted and directed the production, is the artistic director of Wise Children. She has previously adapted and directed several other productions for the company, including The Buddha of Suburbia, Blue Beard, and The Little Matchgirl and Happier Tales. Prior to that, she worked for Kneehigh theatre as an actor, director and artistic director. The production is a co-production with York Theatre Royal, HOME Manchester, and Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse. It has already been performed at York Theatre Royal, HOME Manchester and Liverpool Playhouse, and will also be performed at Everyman Theatre Cheltenham and London's Alexandra Palace Theatre. The creative team working alongside Emma Rice includes set and costume designer Rob Howell, sound designer Simon Baker, lighting designer Malcolm Rippeth, choreographer and movement director Etta Murfitt, and creative consultant Mark Kaufman. The original North by Northwest film was produced and directed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1959, and starred Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint and James Mason. Tickets for the Bath performances can be booked via the Theatre Royal Bath website. The performances will take place at 7.30pm from Tuesday to Saturday, with additional performances at 2.30pm on Wednesday and Saturday. Ticket prices range from £10.50 to £45.50, with a booking fee applicable.
Telegraph
27-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
North by Northwest: A bravura staging that will keep you grinning at its sheer inventiveness
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.
Telegraph
16-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Emma Rice on Alfred Hitchcock: ‘Cancel him? That's the road to madness'
'With paper and a pair of scissors, an aerosol can and some suitcases,' is Emma Rice's answer when I ask her how she plans to stage the famous biplane scene in her forthcoming adaptation of North by Northwest. Another director might have been tempted to use hi-tech wizardry, or video projection at the very least, to recreate the unforgettable moment Cary Grant's Roger Thornhill dives into a cornfield to escape a murderous aircraft in Hitchcock's 1959 Cold War caper. But in Rice's show, she says, the most sophisticated gizmo is a revolving door. 'We've only got a cast of six, and the actors not only play several characters but have to remember whether their door is spinning clockwise or anti-clockwise. So it's fiendishly structured, just like Hitchcock.' We are talking, before rehearsals begin, in the Lucky Chance – the former Methodist church in Frome, Somerset, which Rice's theatre company, Wise Children, recently acquired as its permanent home. It's draughty and a bit damp, but, in typical Emma Rice fashion, it's warmly fitted out in a kitsch, giddy way – neon-pink paint everywhere, fairy lights, mirrors. A director with a folk spirit, who revels in the sensual and the romantic – her hits with her former company, Kneehigh, include a screen-to-stage adaptation of Brief Encounter and the magical Marc Chagall homage The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk – Rice is not an obvious fit for the work of a cinema auteur known for ice-cold psychosexual riddles. Yet she argues that North by Northwest, in which Thornhill, on the run for a crime he didn't commit, finds himself embroiled in a plot to smuggle state secrets out of the country, is more progressive than it might initially seem. 'Eve is the film's moral compass, she's a feminist icon,' says Rice, referring to the femme fatale who becomes Thornhill's lover, played in the film by Eva Marie Saint. 'You have this brave, committed woman and this totally lost man. Hitchcock thought it was his best depiction of a marriage.' Rice has been drawing, too, on the stage directions in Ernest Lehman's original screenplay, which, she says, 'are very sexual. The scene between Thornhill and Eve over dinner on the train: it's alarmingly explicit. So I've had a bit of fun with that.' I ask if she has any qualms about adapting the work of a director whose legacy sits somewhat uneasily alongside accusations of misogyny and reports of unsavoury behaviour on set; in her 2016 memoir, the actress Tippi Hedren claimed the director sexually assaulted her while filming The Birds and Marnie in the 1960s. 'Can you ignore that side of him?' Rice asks rhetorically. 'You know, I might have done. He's iconic, and I liked the idea of thinking, 'I'll have a bit of that.' I don't feel I need to apologise or worry – that's the road to madness. You'll never find the perfect artist who has never said or done anything wrong. 'Anyway,' she adds, 'I'm more interested in the material than the artist. I'll never do one of those desperate 19th-century Hedda Gabler-type plays in which women kill themselves. I can't bear victimhood. I like my women to stay alive and surprise us all and be naughty and sexy and smart.' As a description, that pretty well fits Rice herself. She is forthright, mischievous and more than a little punk, dressed today in leopardskin leggings, her silvery quiff as perky as a porcupine's quills. In 2015, she was appointed artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe, in a move that was greeted with both surprise and delight. Rice – the daughter of a lecturer and a social worker, who attended a Nottingham comprehensive school before training at the Guildhall – is no traditionalist and admitted at the time that she preferred The Archers to the Bard. Yet many thought her irreverent, though exacting, approach would be just the breath of fresh air the venue so sorely needed. Within two years, she was gone, after the Globe board objected to her disregard of original practices and fondness for glitterballs. The dismissal was brutal, humiliating and, for Rice, deeply hurtful. Looking back, a decade on, she sees how the episode ultimately had a galvanising effect on her career. 'Thanks to what happened with the Globe, I'm sometimes portrayed as anti-establishment, but I was never reacting against something,' she says. 'I'm for all sorts of theatre; I'm not against any of it. But I do love being popular. Making work that people are moved by – but also, crucially, entertained by – really matters to me.' In fact, Rice straddles both the margins and the mainstream. Her work is in thrall to fairy tale and slapstick, but it's also firmly establishment: Brief Encounter was a West End hit, and she works frequently with major theatre companies, including, most recently, the RSC, for which her staging of Hanif Kureishi's landmark 1990 debut novel The Buddha of Suburbia was a critical and commercial success. Although she may have a reputation for whimsy and clowning, her ideas are nevertheless deeply rooted in British social history. 'I return over and over again in my work to the period after the Second World War and that bubble of hope that meant my mother and father became the first in their families to go to university,' she says. 'My grandparents were working class and weren't able to be educated, while my grandad fought in the war and never spoke about it. So I have this immense gratitude for that period. 'The reason I can sit in this magic playground' – she casts an arm around the Lucky Chance bar – 'is because my parents did the work and my grandparents made the sacrifice. And North by Northwest sits in that really fertile pot of hope and fear, and that feeling that the war, which by implication its male characters would almost certainly have fought in, must never happen again. 'And yet,' she says, taking a breath, 'here we are today, once again on the verge.' We are speaking in the week that Trump described Zelensky as a dictator. 'God knows what's going to happen. I feel as though I haven't been fearful in my whole life and now suddenly I am.' Rice once told an interviewer she was a child of Thatcher, much to the horror of her socialist parents: she later clarified that she had merely meant she grew up under Thatcher, rather than ascribed to her politics. Yet now she says: 'You look back on that period and you think, well, at least it was decent and transparent and had a clear moral code. At least Thatcher had a plan, and loved talking to the press because she wanted to have the argument. And now..?' The last time I spoke to Rice was in the middle of the pandemic and Wise Children, the company she set up after leaving the Globe was, like so many, on its knees. Things are much more stable now, to the point that the company was able to buy the Lucky Chance outright on the back of such successful productions as her wild and fabulous 2021 adaptation of Wuthering Heights, which is about to embark on an international tour. But the fear of failure never leaves her. 'I think the unthinkable all the time,' she says. 'There are fewer audiences regionally, so there is less money, and it costs three times as much to stage a show now as it did before the pandemic, so I've had to scale back what we do.' The day before we meet, Lisa Nandy, the Culture Secretary, announced an extra £270 million of arts funding: is Rice confident the sector is in safe hands under Labour? 'I can't, hand-on-heart, say the Government needs to give the arts more money, because look at what it's facing,' she says. 'Of course, I say that as a theatre maker who has benefited from funding from the minute I went to drama school and, yes, funding is absolutely vital. But you have to make the business case by putting on theatre that people want. It's not medicine.' Theatre may be in her bones, but Rice admits there are some days she thinks about stepping away from it altogether. 'It's an ancient art form, but I don't take it for granted,' she says. 'The more you think about it, theatre is a very weird thing we do.'
