King's Theatre, Edinburgh
Four stars
The scarlet drapes that hang down centre-stage surrounded by even more
vivid rouge-flamed walls hide a multitude of sins at the start of Lucy
Bailey's touring revival of her 2009 production of Frederick Knott's
labyrinthine 1950s pot-boiler immortalised in Alfred Hitchcock's film.
Such ravishing décor might well be engulfing an opulently realised
Greek tragedy if it weren't for the elegant London town-house
accoutrements and a tellingly red telephone that screams emergency as
it furnishes the scene of the crime.
That crime isn't one of passion, but, as retired tennis star Tony
Wendice plots to murder his faithless wife Sheila, who, as played by
Kelly Hotten, has been conducting a long-distance amour with Philip
Cairns' crime writer Max, it's one of pathologically driven, ice-cold
calculation. That Tony blackmails an old school chum turned con-man to
do the deed by proxy only serves to make it nastier, as though the
flesh and blood of such an action is something Daniel Betts' flint-eyed
Tony finds physically repulsive. When things go wrong, it takes
Christopher Timothy's Inspector Hubbard to find the key that makes
sense of the affair.
While it's hard at times to take Knott's stiff upper-lipped exchanges
seriously, casting Max as a crime writer lends things a self-reflexive
edge that's easy to theatricalise. At times the action is half-hidden
by the slowly revolving and exquisitely choreographed drapes. During
the murder scene, meanwhile, Mic Pool's brooding, trumpet-led
underscore ups the volume to become something more jagged, with
Sheila's amplified gasps blending in with stabbing staccato passages
worthy of Bernard Herrmann in a psycho-sexual thriller in which the
tension is heightened to the max.
The Herald, February 21st 2014
ends
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