A different direction

How a screen-to-stage adaptation of classic thriller North by Northwest challenged the cast and creators behind the new Auckland Theatre Company production. b

- RUSSELL BAILLIE

The 20th-century films of Alfred Hitchcock keep coming back as 21st-century stage productions. For some, that makes perfect sense as they were theatrical works first the director’s movies of Rope, Dial M for Murder and Blackmail all started out as plays. Today, Dial M for Murder is still doing the rounds in productions taking their cues from the film and Blackmail has also been revived. Some, like a stage version of The Birds, went back to the source material of the Daphne du Maurier short story.

As well, there have been plays about the master of suspense himself and his proclivities, such as David Rudkin’s The Lovesong of Alfred J Hitchcock and Terry Johnson's Hitchcock Blonde.

The most successful stage reimagining of a Hitchcock film has been The 39 Steps, which has been performed around the world since first becoming a hit in London’s West End in 2006. It sent up the British stiffness of the 1935 movie and all things Hitchcock with just four actors playing dozens of roles.

After Melbourne producers Andrew Kay and Liza McLean brought The 39 Steps to Australia for a second time, they wondered what else in the director’s back catalogue might work.

They chose North by Northwest, despite a screen-to-stage translation presenting some possible, well, hitches. If there’s a Hitchcock movie that is least like a play, this was it.

The 1959 film is a story of planes, trains and automobiles. It has stop-offs at the United Nations in New York, Chicago, Mt Rushmore, anda dusty cornfield in the middle of nowhere where the hero gets buzzed by a biplane until it crashes into a truck. It ends with an actual cliff-hanger. None of this exactly suggests intimate theatre production.

It’s also a movie with two stars Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint in career-defining, fabulously handsome roles.