An artist is useless in his Chelsea studio, stabbed within the throat, blood in all places. However this stage isn't any crime scene: the one purple stuff is the strawberry jam that policeman Harold Webber spreads on his bread. That’s as a result of Mark Ravenhill has sliced off the primary act from Charles Bennett’s thriller, greatest recognized for turning into Alfred Hitchcock’s first talkie in 1929.
We don’t see the artist’s assault on a younger lady, Alice, who kills him in self-defence. In Ravenhill’s model – half his dialogue, half Bennett’s – we as an alternative hear about it in grim element. Alice (Jessie Hills) tells first Harold (Gabriel Akuwudike), to whom she is engaged, and later her mum, Ada (Lucy Velocity).
Harold has been assigned the homicide case, which might result in promotion, and the battle between public responsibility and private loyalty to his fiancee provides Bennett’s play the suspenseful momentum of a potboiler (additional boosted by the arrival of a blackmailer).
Ravenhill’s model features a wealth of social context. It’s the summer time of 1928: a kitchen radio tells of Emmeline Pankhurst’s funeral and the Equal Franchise Act giving girls over 21 the appropriate to vote, however within the backroom of their cornershop, Ada tuts about Alice’s flapper type and narrows her daughter’s horizons. Awe of a better social class is proven as one motive why Alice accompanied the artist again to his residence, whereas Ravenhill’s further emphasis on the abuse of energy, and its attendant complicity, resonate within the age of #MeToo.
There are different headline 2022 points, too, corresponding to cronyism and wavering belief within the police to guard girls. The problem, principally however not all the time achieved, is to deal with these severely whereas additionally oiling the wheels of an edge-of-your-seat thriller. “Everybody loves a homicide,” says Ada, anticipating further newspaper gross sales within the store. That applies to theatregoers who would possibly count on a sure kind of old style thriller however get some further queasy realism too, which may typically show a jarring mixture.
Like Hitchcock’s Stage Fright, there’s an acute consciousness of the inherent theatricality of the justice course of, and like I Confess there are compelling ethical quandaries. A number of the characterisations want additional complexity, nevertheless, and Anthony Banks’s fashionable manufacturing might do with ratcheting up the stress and tempo.
Patrick Walshe McBride, because the blackmailer, excels when reflecting on the hidden lives of homosexual males within the 20s. Although languidly sly, like Donald Calthrop within the movie, he appears extra irritant than menace to the couple and there's a little an excessive amount of humour within the combine – particularly within the scene the place the phrase “knife” is repeated, to comedian fairly than chilling impact.
Arielle Smith’s choreography turns a rumba between Alice and Harold into an aftershock of trauma however that sequence – on the preview I noticed – didn’t but startle as it'd. David Woodhead’s good-looking, jutting design provides a putting cutaway of the nook constructing, with lamp-lighters, stray canine and cyclists bustling across the edges. There’s a pulsing, spectral sound design from Ben and Max Ringham whereas Howard Hudson’s lighting of the store’s latticed glass creates a palpable sense of confinement.
One sensible design contact amongst many is the silhouette of a ghostly nightdress hanging in a window, evoking the picture of Anny Ondra within the movie. Hitchcock casts fairly the shadow however by the top Ravenhill emerges as a grasp of ethical suspense.
On the Mercury theatre, Colchester, till 19 March
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