Director Emma Rice on adapting Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘North by Northwest’ for the stage: “I love the impossibility of it”
Plays have long been a source of inspiration for films, but the reverse is far less common. With a few notable exceptions, such as The Lion King, movies do not tend to make the leap to theatre. Soon, however, audiences will have the opportunity to see one of the most beloved films of ‘Golden Age’ Hollywood on the stage. Emma Rice, the influential director, actor, and writer behind the theatre company Wise Children, is staging Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 thriller North by Northwest at York Theatre Royal this month before beginning a national tour.
This isn’t Rice’s first time adapting a cinema classic. She worked as an actor, director, and artistic director of the acclaimed Cornwall-based theatre company Kneehigh, where she spearheaded productions of The Red Shoes, Brief Encounter, and A Matter of Life and Death. When she was approached about adapting North by Northwest, a twisty, stylish thriller in which Cary Grant plays a man who is mistaken for someone else and pursued across America by a mysterious international organisation, she couldn’t pass up the opportunity.
“If you’re given a chance to work on a Hitchcock, you don’t say no,” she said. But she was also drawn to the magnitude of the challenge. “This one in particular is so impossible to stage, which is what I love as a theatre director,” she explained, adding, “You have to work magic. I loved the impossibility of it.”
The film is full of grand setpieces that are presumably impossible to translate to the theatre, including the United Nations, where Grant’s character, a hapless adman named Roger Thornhill, seeks shelter, open fields where Thornhill is dive-bombed by an aeroplane and Mount Rushmore. For Rice, the starting point was to zero in on the period and give herself clear parameters. Released in the wake of World War II, North by Northwest has the kind of opulence and glamour that was Hollywood’s trademark at the time, but Rice wanted to make sure that all that glitz and grandeur was given the proper context.
“I really wanted it to feel very potent in that post-war period,” she said. “My mum and dad grew up in the war, and they were really grateful for the life that they had, which was that post-war bubble of hope.” In terms of parameters, she has opted for four concrete elements to create a sense of time: revolving doors, newspapers, clothes, and suitcases. She and her set designer, Rob Howell, wanted to instil a sense of movement and unpredictability, a feeling that you never quite know what’s happening at any given moment. “You make a really potent palette, and then those are your boundaries,” she said, “And, of course, all art is better with boundaries.”
One pleasant surprise that made the adaptation significantly easier than it could have been was right there in Ernest Lehman’s script: stage directions. “They are magic, really,” Rice said. “An absolute gold mine. And I have used a lot of them. I mean, they are laugh-out-loud funny and really beautifully written. And I found a way of weaving them in through a narrative voice that I feel is really true to the film but actually gives a really unique piece to the theatre.”
Another surprising discovery was more thematic than textual. One of the reasons Rice leapt at the opportunity to do the project was that she had just completed two emotionally gruelling plays and was looking forward to something that posed a more plot-driven challenge. However, although North by Northwest is the Platonic ideal escapist cinema, she found an unexpected political undercurrent that resonates today.
“I thought it would be a respite, and it’s turned out to be a comment,” she said. “I have to absolutely credit Hitchcock for that, in that I realised really early on that at the very heart of the film is the United Nations. And to look back at that and think, actually, that’s where [Thornhill] went for sanctuary. That’s also where murder happened. In this beautiful building of hope, this terrible thing happens… And I think that became really clear to me, that it’s based on a really shaky hope, and I feel that that’s really potent in these times.”
An even greater thread of resonance with the present was the character of Eve Kendall, a classic Hitchcock blonde who meets Thornhill on a train and helps him evade detection. Their ensuing romance is more complex than many on-screen love affairs of the time, due in no small part to Eve’s past and her precarious position within the plot. “Eve Kendall is the person in most jeopardy, with the most bravery, with the finest moral compass in the show,” Rice said.
The film merely hinted at her past, but the director decided to deepen it for the play and, in so doing, found ways to deepen the people around her as well.
“I think the character is really well drawn, actually, particularly when you start backtracking all her lies and why she’s lying and how she lies, and how she’s forced to use her body, and how she gently talks about that,” Rice said. “And I think I’ve gently teased it out with all of the characters. I have given them a backstory which just tickles underneath. Every character in that film has just come out of a war. So every one of them has a story that has brought them to this moment and to this place, and I’ve drawn that in.”
Political allusions and complex character arcs aside, Rice is just happy with how much humour shines through. “It’s worth remembering that the script is funny,” she said. “Cary Grant is funny. I’m quite a silly director as well. So it’s going to be an absolutely thrilling watch.”
She’s also managed to do the one thing that most fans of Hitchcock’s film would assume was truly impossible: untangle the plot (or, as Rice labelled it, “the absolute, dastardly, unbearable, mind-bending plot”). “I’ve done it,” she said, revealing that she and her partner created note cards of every plot point and spread them out on the floor to tease it out. Just when she’d given up on one particular loose end, one of her actors came to the rescue. “At that moment, I literally punched the air,” she says, adding, “Honestly, I’ve never, ever worked on anything like it.”
‘North by Northwest’ will run from 18th March to 5th April at York Theatre Royal.
