Less a whydunnit than a whywatchit - Strangers on a Train, Theatre Royal, Brighton and touring, review
There was bad news towards the end of last year about play-going in the regions. Recent box-office data showed a worrying slump in attendances in 2016, with a drop in overall performances and more than a half a million fewer tickets sold.
Given the pressures on the sector, anyone slogging round the country with an ambitious piece of drama deserves applause, if not support. Try as I might, though, I can’t muster much enthusiasm for Anthony Banks’s stylish-looking but oddly insubstantial presentation of Patricia Highsmith’s ingenious debut novel (made famous by the swiftly ensuing 1951 black-and-white Hitchcock film) in which two American men get talking on a train and the “perfect” double-crime is floated: each can theoretically do away with the problem person in the other’s life, allowing the beneficiary of each murder to set up an alibi and thereby escape detection.
Hitchcock maximised the thrill-factor, even if by turning the adulterous, unhappily married anti-hero Guy from an architect into a tennis champ he devoted too much screen-time to the sight of Farley Granger gallivanting about a court.
Those who know the film may be surprised how much suspense, and action, is absent from Craig Warner’s adaptation, which clunks as badly as David Woodhead’s quasi-cinematic set-design, sliding panels and multiple interiors resulting in noises off.
We see neither the murder of Guy’s faithless wife Miriam nor the shooting of the controlling paterfamilias detested by restless playboy and creepy schemer-in-chief Bruno (Chris Harper, known to millions as Coronation Street villain Nathan Curtis, and here giggling so much you want to strangle him).
Jack Ashton (Rev Tom in Call the Midwife) struggles to make us care much about Guy’s predicament – the character seems to fulfil his pact with a psycho on auto-pilot, and his subsequent pangs of conscience ring hollow. The second-half has a sluggish, rather slapdash quality to it – and in general the women’s roles are so lacking they’re a crime in their own right (Hannah Tointon, sister of Kara, is saddled with Guy’s airhead mistress).
Highsmith is said to have written not ‘whodunnits’ but ‘whydunnits’. Here, never mind whosinit, the big unanswered question is “whywatchit?”.
Until Sat. Tickets: 0844 871 7650; then tours to March 31
