STAGEStrangers On A Train
Gielgud Theatre
★★★✩✩
IN A NUTSHELL
A stylish and slick take on Hitchcock's classic has plenty of tension, but is occasionally stymied by its own aesthetic ambition
REVIEW
There's a cunning, canny and disconcerting night at the cinema to be had at the Gielgud Theatre.
Strangers On A Train is a slick and impressive hybrid of movie vernacular and live work, entertaining in parts and visually rich throughout although never quite reconciled to the demands of its twin masters.
The premise is perfect in its simplicity. Two men, architect Guy Haines and playboy Charles Bruno clink glasses on a deal. The strangers will bump off the others' nemeses - Guy's money-grubbing wife and Bruno's hated father.
With nothing to connect the two and their own alibis in place, nothing can possibly go wrong...
But Guy is a nerd not a murderer. And Charles is not the swish, moustachio'd bon-viveur he would have Guy believe.
Instead he is an increasingly deranged and queasy alcoholic-cum-stalker, unable to come to terms with his actions, Guy's appalled reaction to them and the general collapse of his mental and moral state.
The "perfect strangers" alibi vanishes in a trice when Bruno turns up at Guy's wedding. And, with Bruno's ghostly face thereafter always appearing at the French windows, and with private eye Gerard (Christian McKay) hard on their trail, Guy is pushed to the brink of his own form of madness.
There are homosexual overtones to their relationship and the tension comes from Bruno's attempts to inviegle himself into the marriage of Guy and Anne (Miranda Raison).
While writer Craig Warner has drawn from Patricia Highsmith's source novel, rather than Alfred Hitchcock's 1951 movie, Robert Allan Ackerman's fluid production is all about film noir with back projections, discordant violins, swift scenes and a monochromatic palette.
Meanwhile, Tim Goodchild's extraordinary revolving stage, like Tommy Cooper's bottle-glass-glass-bottle routine sees entire sets come and go with no apparent link to the laws of physics.
Jack Huston is remarkable as the dissolving Bruno but his grasp of melodrama is not shared with Laurence Fox who remains insouciant long after sheer bloody terror would be the more appropriate response.
When he does lose his rag, it's impressive, but he quickly finds it again and gives it a prissy wash and iron to boot.
The women are not given much to do beyond caricature. The blissful Miranda Raison is required to be the artless wife, MyAnna Buring as Guy's hated first wife is here and gone while Imogen Stubbs makes the most of Bruno's mother, playing the incestuous vamp like Marilyn Monroe on 40-a-day.
The plot machinations are gripping throughout but the tension that is carefully built dissipates too quickly, with the intended shock ending not fully earned by the pacing of the preceding action.
Until Feb 22, Gielgud Theatre, strangersonatrain.com.
