Mistaken identity fires Alfred Hitchcock’s Kafkaesque 1959 spy thriller. The existential terror of a man under attack by unknown forces begins when New York ad-man Roger Thornhill stands up to make a phone call in a hotel lobby and is mistaken for George Kaplan, a nonexistent spy created as a decoy by the US’s cold war-era security services. From thereon in he is pursued by enemies of the state. If everyone insists Roger is George, where does that leave his sense of self?
Emma Rice’s adaptation is not concerned with the crisis around identity but with sending up the espionage genre through an archly played collection of spies and villains.
It is delightfully playful, although there is not quite enough charge underneath. The drama’s themes of global crisis, security and the toxic legacies of war are raised rather too late, like an afterthought. There is little Hitchcockian brooding or darkness either, nor the jeopardy of the film.
But the theatrical fun, games and entertainment are plentiful, along with witty subversions. Much of the film’s screenplay is preserved, some of its dated jokes delivered thick with irony, but the adaptation adds narration, wry commentary and fourth-wall puncturing moments which contain genuinely funny audience participation.
Women play men, men play women, and characters break out into slinky dances or lip-sync to period jazz numbers (compositions by Simon Baker, combined with classics by Peggy Lee, Ella Fitzgerald, Cole Porter and more).
Ewan Wardrop captures Cary Grant’s droll distemper from the film and appears like a comical Hitchcockian 007 with his dry martinis and smoothness. His romance with Eva Kendall (Patrycja Kujawska), clad in femme fatale red dress, is played tongue-in-cheek.
Spies in long coats and shades swirl around them; characters are vaguely reminiscent of the satirised British intelligence men from the musical Operation Mincemeat (that second world war incident was one of the influences for the film).
The six-strong cast, including Rice’s company stalwarts, do a remarkable job of conjuring the sense of a far bigger ensemble on stage. They excel at physical comedy, often set to jazz shuffles and shucks, with humorous choreography by Etta Murfitt. The professor-narrator is a highlight, played by Katy Owen (who was luminous in Rice’s Wuthering Heights, too).
It is a feat too to transpose the film’s action-led set-pieces featuring trains, planes and car chases on hairpin bends. Rice manages this with typically intelligent humour and imagination: the UN headquarters in which a murder takes place is gracefully conjured with a formation of telephone operators speaking a babel of languages while the iconic crop-dusting plane attack on Thornhill is full of miniaturised invention.
Malcolm Rippeth’s witty lighting works well with Rob Howell’s elegant set design, a series of revolving doors and liqueur bottles. The effect is glorious and grand, filling the stage and gesturing towards the ever-changing disguises that the cast assume.
It is a production that feels emphatically light and the final Mount Rushmore scene does not carry the precipitous danger of the film (how could it?). But this is an espionage crowd-pleaser for the summer – fun, intelligent and powered by Rice’s joyful whimsy.
• At York Theatre Royal until 5 April. Then touring until 22 June.
