THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
By John Logan
Hampstead Theatre, Eton Avenue, London NW3 3EU until March 16, 2024
You get two plays for the price of one here and all in under 90 minutes. One story is more familiar, concerning Alfred Hitchcock's abusive relationship with Tippi Hedren, and the other is about a lesser-known movie set bust-up between Vincent Price, the king of camp horror, and the handsome neophyte English director he worked with on the cult classic Witchfinder General.
Both take place simultaneously on the same set with the scenes are seamlessly spliced together by director Jonathan Kent. It even has the odd moments of matching dialogue. The problem is that the great writing in evidence here ends up getting tangled up the in the central conceit. The synthesis of the two stories is intriguing but this viewer longed for more of the Price story, which could have made a play in itself, as Price was such a rich character.
The Hedren story, set during the filming of Marnie in 1964, is a more familiar; there's been a film and a miniseries and Hedren's book. The horrible predations she endured at the hands of Hitchcock, first on The Birds (where she was effectively tortured) and later on Marnie have led writer John Logan to say, regretfully, that he can no longer separate the artist from the man. But that's a whole other set of arguments. Still, in the context of #MeToo, it's great that we are reminded of the human cost of indulging the 'Great Man' theory.
Logan of course knows film sets better than most having written a bunch of movie blockbusters before his stage hits such as Red (with Eddie Redmayne), which won him a Tony. He's great on that knotty struggle between art and commerce which underlies the movie business. He's great too on the compromises you make financially and emotionally and how the bullies get away with so much. Hedren did of course seek help at the time, but it all fell on deaf ears. Amazingly she was under personal contract to Hitchcock and not the studio. Here, Logan presents her, pushed to the edge of humiliation, fighting back, but this ends up the weakest scene in the play, coming across as speechifying in retrospect, rather than believable dialogue.
Anthony Ward's spectacular full set grounds us in naturalism, which is great for a piece that also deftly explores the fakeness of cinema vis-a-vis theater. It's the cottage Hitchcock built for himself in the backlot at Universal, a sort of home from home and it also works splendidly for the rented house in Suffolk that the young director here used while filming Witchfinder General.
In the Price story it is 1967 and young film director Michael Reeves (Rowan Polonski) is trying to cook dinner to mollify the veteran actor Vincent Price (Jonathan Hyde) with whom he's had a bust up on set. Logan's razor-sharp dialogue perfectly captures the swish arrogance of the urbane boulevardier and gourmand that was Price. That style of course infuriated the 24 year old Reeves who, in thrall to the 'nouvelle vague' era of directors, was seeking to shed cinema of what he considered fake Hollywood campery. Price bursts his balloon by reminding him that, yes, they were both engaged on another cheapskate adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe. Price is no fool though and takes direction and a curious sexual frisson develops between the two.
Tragically, Reeves died of an accidental overdose within a year of the filming and so we never got see if he would have made it or to hear his side of this story.
The quartet of actors are superb, moving beyond mere impersonation. Joanna Vanderham and Jonathan Hyde deftly reveal layers of ambiguity in their rich characters and Polonski is quietly moving as the fiery but fragile Reeves. Ian McNeice frighteningly captures the dark fetishism of Hitchcock's personality and the depths of his self-regard at a time when he was at the peak of his reputation.
This is a wallow for movie fans but also a subtle exploration of the lopsided power dynamic between a director and a star.
Like the best theater it poses questions without offering answers.
