North by Northwest, Alexandra Palace review - Hitchcock adaptation fails to fly

Older readers may recall the cobbled together, ramshackle play, a staple of the Golden Age of Light Entertainment that would close out The Morecambe and Wise Show and The Generation Game. Mercifully, we don’t have grandmothers from Slough squinting as they read lines off the back of a teapot in this show, but there are still too many callbacks to those long-forgotten set pieces of Saturday night telly.

There’s a lot of effort put into creating a 1950s Cold War vibe in Emma Rice’s adaptation of Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, but that jokey 1970s tone overpowers set design, costuming, music, language and acting. What emerges is something closer to pantomime – in June.We open on Madison Avenue executive, Roger Thornhill, being mistaken for the shady George Kaplan, consequently kidnapped by a pair of heavies and delivered up to the mansion of the mysterious Lester Townsend. Soon, the confused ad man is entangled with espionage and counter-espionage at the United Nations, with time to be strafed by a crop sprayer and meet a femme fatale who may, or may not, be on the level.

That’s a lot of plot, and we’re given a narrator to help us. Katy Owen (pictured above with Ewan Wardrop) plays The Professor in a David Byrneish oversized suit and some of the knowing attitude of her counterpart in The Rocky Horror Show, even co-opting the audience participation approach. Maybe it worked in some of the smaller venues earlier on the tour, but she’s lost on the vast stage of the Alexandra Palace Theatre and her re-caps and explanations just float away in the cavernous space (pictured below). You just can’t create the complicity and camaraderie required across the fourth wall when it’s as high and wide as this one.Much else doesn’t really add up. Would a charming twice-married middle-aged New Yorker really be as dumb a mark as Thornhill? Would all the trouble involved in running fake operatives (and we know it’s a big job from Operation Mincemeat) be trusted to such a Keystone Cops team? And do deaths and a longish sermon on the value of love and trust in an epilogue really sit with what has passed in the previous two hours of the show?

We do get some fine over-the-top character acting, especially from Karl Queensborough as the villainous Phillip Vandamme, also dragging up to double as Thornhill’s assertive mother. Ewan Wardrop brings some charisma to the thankless task of trying to make us forget about Cary Grant and runs on the spot with real vigour as the perpetually bamboozled executive.

Even at the end of a long tour, others in the cast seemed unsure of their footing, an understandable conundrum in a play about double-crossing, to be fair. Patrycja Kujawska vamps it up so much to seduce Thornhill for nefarious ends that it’s hard to catch when she starts to doubt her own loyalties and feelings. Mirabelle Gremaud and Simon Oskarsson never settle into the function of buffoonish comic relief, dead eyed contract killers or poignantly lost souls, so we can’t get a read on them either.

Rob Howell creates a flexible set of revolving doors that beautifully evokes a Manhattan hotel lobby and bar, but the drinks bottles stay in place for the next two hours or so. Like the narration, actors lip-synching to recordings of 40s and 50s songs is a nice novelty that soon outstays its welcome. And a few origami ears of corn may pass muster in a fringe panto, but, even given this company’s aesthetic, it feels like we’re being shortchanged.

Much of this griping wouldn’t matter much if the storytelling was crystal clear, but it isn’t, despite the multiple tension-dispelling interjections of The Professor. Quite what was motivating the characters proved difficult to pin down, which limited our empathy and obscured the jeopardy. And, if you have to suggest Mount Rushmore by means of a few suitcases piled on top of each other as you can see from your seat at Gatwick any time you’re waiting to leave the gate, you’ve probably bitten off more than you can chew.

It might well be very hard indeed to capture Hitchcock’s unique talents on stage – but it shouldn’t be this hard.

• North by Northwest at the Alexandra Palace until 22 June
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