Preview Dial M for Murder
Simon Walker looks ahead to the Playhouse interpretation of this classic thriller
Preview: Dial M for Murder
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The West Yorkshire Playhouse opens its Autumn/Winter season ambitiously, with a production of a play that partakes of perhaps the least stage happy genre: the thriller. Dial M for Murder is known chiefly as a 1954 inductee to the portfolio of British film director Alfred Hitchcock, the colossus of the thriller celebrated for the psychological tension that he brought to the formula. Though author Frederick Knott wrote the screenplay and, indeed, befriended Hitchcock during the filming process, his original script was a play, albeit one that was produced on television before the stage.
As Hitchcock’s interest suggests, the yarn is a pretty dour one. It’s about ex-tennis star Tony Wendice’s attempt to bump off his philandering other half and her former lover by hiring the services of a dubious cove styled Captain Lesgate. Perturbed by the knowledge that losing his missus would mean losing the lifestyle that her wealth allows, Wendice has been planning the big day for a year, but manifestly it doesn’t go quite as envisaged since, well, no self respecting playwright would pen a script in which it did.
The WYP’s production is a collaboration with Fiery Angel, an outfit that specialises in children’s theatre. For three years the partnership’s previous success has been thrusting tremors around the West End, where The 39 Steps, adapted by Patrick Barlow from John Buchan’s novel, was eventually re-housed following its debut at the WYP in 2005. Having won the Olivier Award for Best New Comedy in 2007, it has procreated tirelessly, as there have now been productions in 26 countries. (Naturally, one of which was on Broadway.)
Director Lucy Bailey has also triumphed at the Playhouse in the recent past. 2004’s The Postman Always Rings Twice not only reached the West End, but impressed Heat star Val Kilmer enough that he spent a stint on its cast. Her choice of previous productions illustrates good taste in writers (Tennessee Williams, Samuel Beckett), and she has just made her RSC debut with a version of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Perhaps more questionably, she is a co-founder of The Gogmagogs which, the WYP politely assures us, “combine(s) virtuoso string playing with dynamic physical movement and inventive, groundbreaking theatre”.
The difficulty of cultivating a suitably tense atmosphere, but without simply appearing to echo film techniques with scarcer space and resources, is one of the reasons that thrillers don’t always thrive when shepherded to the stage. However, the WYP/Fiery Angel production is surely safe in one respect, at least. Sound designer Mic Pool is not merely a Tony Award winner: as the Playhouse’s associate director (creative technology), he’s a Tony Award winner who knows his landscape as well as any cabbie.
11 September to 3 October, Courtyard Theatre, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Playhouse Square, Quarry Hill, LS2 7UP, 0113 213 7800, £16-26
Posted on Tuesday 25th August 2009
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