If any writer has made equal success of stage and cinema, it’s playwright and screenwriter John Logan, whose films include ‘Gladiator’, ‘Skyfall’ and ‘The Aviator’ and stage work takes in the likes of smash Rothko drama ‘Red’ and the musical ‘Moulin Rouge!’.
In his latest play, he brings screen to the stage to explore the high-stakes power-dynamics of the big screen by simultaneously playing out tense relationships between real-life directors and their stars: Alfred Hitchcock and Tippi Hedren while making ‘Marnie’ (1964), and Michael Reeves and Vincent Price during ‘Witchfinder General’ (1968).
In Jonathan Kent’s production, both pairs weave obliviously around each other in the same detailed cottage set, which stands in for Hitchcock’s recreation of a bit of Britishness in a Californian backlot, and the real place Reeves lived in while filming his cult classic in the UK. The script makes a feature of certain items being in both. This is a little confusing at the start, but Kent’s inventive use of the space – at one point, all four sit and eat in tense silence at the same table – is engaging.
The counterpoint is a fascinating if not wholly enlightening device. Hitchcock’s horrific treatment of his women stars is given full airing here, as Ian McNeice’s director switches between manipulative avuncularity and a constant, ‘cinematic’ commentary on her body that objectifies Joanna Vanderham’s exhausted Hedren, as he forces her to rehearse the psycho-sexual nastiness of ‘Marnie’. Vanderham really makes you feel Hedren’s despairing sense of the inescapability of it all. While Logan gives her a retributive moment – when she turns that unblinking camera lens back on Hitchcock’s psyche – it doesn't remove the discomfort.
It also doesn’t cast a sparkling new light on the tension between the old-school Price – he of the knowingly arched eyebrow and iconic voice – and the complicated Reeve, who, at 24, is disgusted by hammy horror and wants ‘truthful’ violence. Jonathan Hyde, as Price, and Rowan Polonski, as Reeves, are good at exposing their vulnerabilities at the same time they lunge to attack. They play cat-and-mouse over age, mental health and authenticity. Hyde, in particular, switches from disdain to suddenly crumpled and tired journeyman actor.
Logan has a richly evocative way with language and ideas that slowly pulls you in. He has particularly fascinating things to say about the anxiety of influence in Price’s conflict with Reeves – including the possibility of finding common ground as the wheels of change grind into new positions in cinema’s fickle landscape. There’s rich dramatic territory here – a fertile look at art and audiences. I’m just not sure it finds its best framing in this play.
The juxtaposition of these scenes with the inexorable, claustrophobic awfulness of Hitchcock’s treatment of Hedren is awkward. At times, the play seems to draw an unconvincing equivalence. At others, it contorts itself into shared lines of dialogue between the two pairs that suggest a connective tissue where there isn’t really any. These moments come off more cheaply than this production, at its most interesting, warrants. Two plays for the price of one isn’t always a bargain.