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Search forHitch flick gets stage revamp
Friday, September 05, 2008, 07:30
The theatre starts its 60th anniversary season with a dizzying tale of romantic obsession and paralysing fear.
Vertigo is adapted by Jonathan Holloway from the original novel by partners in crime Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac which inspired one of Hitchcock's greatest movies.
Holloway returns the psychological thriller to wartime Paris and, in supremely theatrical style, frames the tale of the tortured hero as a public demonstration of hypnosis.
The Playhouse's artistic director Giles Croft directs Ben Keaton (Casualty), David Acton, Phillipa Peak and Robin Bowerman (Emmerdale), with Designer Jamie Vartan contributing an ingenious set.
Presented in association with Red Shift Theatre Company, Vertigo runs at Nottingham Playhouse from Friday, September 12, 12 to Saturday, September 27.
Call the box office on 0115 941 9419 to book and for more information. www.nottinghamplayhouse.co.uk).
Racked with guilt, Roger Flavières left the police after his vertigo caused the death of a fellow officer. Now, with Paris steeling itself for war and occupation, an old acquaintance asks Flavières to shadow his wife – and a still greater torment enfolds him. Falling helplessly in love with the beautiful Madeleine, he finds his sanity shattered when she suddenly takes her own life. Then, after five fragile years of recovery, an innocent cinema trip leaves Flavières clinging to the edge of reason by his very fingertips. For there on screen, unmistakably staring out from that day's newsreel, is Madeleine…
VERTIGO is both an absorbing thriller and a mesmerising dissection of obsession and madness. Audience members find themselves cast as the spectators in a hospital lecture room in post-war Paris, where psychologist Dr Jacques Ballard (David Acton) brings a showman's flourish to a public demonstration of hypnotic regression. Ballard compels his subject Flavières (Ben Keaton) to relive his terrifying story and even assists in re-enacting it, along with male nurse Gratin (Robin Bowerman). But only the audience enters sufficiently into the mind's eye of Flavières to see the mysterious Madeleine (Phillipa Peak) – a femme fatale in more ways than one.
The cast of VERTIGO comprises some familiar faces. Playing Flavières, Ben Keaton is instantly recognisable as hospital worker Spencer in BBC TV's Casualty. He is also a Perrier award-winning comedian, writer and theatre actor, with multiple Best Actor awards for his work at Manchester's Royal Exchange and an Olivier nomination for his Groucho Marx in Animal Crackers. Ballard is the second doctor that RSC veteran David Acton has played at Nottingham Playhouse, following the enigmatic Dr Görtler in Priestley's I Have Been Here Before. Phillipa Peak, who plays both Madeleine and her mysterious double, appeared previously at the Playhouse in the title role of The Taming of the Shrew and Robin Bowerman – known to Emmerdale viewers as Councillor Harry Ledbetter – adds the part of Gratin to Playhouse credits in The Day That Kevin Came and Double Indemnity.
Playwright Jonathan Holloway takes inspiration for the framing device of hypnotic regression both from his own childhood experience of hypnotism and from the nineteenth-century psychologist Charcot, who drew a fashionable crowd to his famous demonstrations of hypnosis in the Salpêtrière hospital. Although Charcot's theories are long discredited, such public demonstrations had a brief revival in post-war France – perfectly matching the original setting for the story of VERTIGO. Nottingham Playhouse's staging is the first large-scale realisation of Holloway's adaptation and he has revised the script since its acclaimed production by Red Shift, with whom his many other successes include stage versions of The Third Man and Get Carter. Giles Croft has commissioned and directed two previous plays by Jonathan Holloway at Nottingham Playhouse: Because It's There, the story of Mallory and Irvine's assault on Everest, and Angels Among the Trees, which recounted the unpalatable fate of the Donner Party.
Best known from Alfred Hitchcock's film adaptation starring James Stewart – itself 50 years old in 2008 – VERTIGO has its origins in the novel D'entre les morts, published in English as The Living and the Dead and created by the hugely influential crime-writing partnership of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. With Boileau devising the plot and Narcejac developing characterisation, they were at the forefront of crime fiction's evolution from "whodunnits", centred on an impassionate detective, into psychological suspense dramas exploring the emotions of those directly caught up in crime. As such they proved inspirational to filmmakers: as well as Hitchcock's Vertigo, international hit Les Diaboliques was taken from a Boileau-Narcejac novel and they contributed the screenplay to the grisly cult horror Les yeux sans visage.
Giles Croft joined Nottingham Playhouse as Artistic Director in 1999 following posts as Literary Manager at the National Theatre and Artistic Director of the Gate Theatre, London and the Palace Theatre, Watford. Other plays he has directed in Nottingham include Polygraph, The Day That Kevin Came, Double Indemnity, The Man Who, I Have Been Here Before and Beast on the Moon. His productions of Rat Pack Confidential and Sir Arnold Wesker's Chicken Soup with Barley both transferred to London, while All Quiet on the Western Front embarks on a UK tour this autumn.
The set for VERTIGO is guaranteed to contain several exquisite surprises. In international demand as a Designer for both opera and theatre, Jamie Vartan worked alongside Giles Croft and Jonathan Holloway on innovative snowscapes for both Because It's There and Angels Among the Trees. He also designed Old Big 'Ead in The Spirit of the Man and, most recently, created a full-scale railway carriage for Breaking the Silence which rose up and left the stage at the end of the play. Lighting is by Simon Corder and sound design by Drew Baumohl, with Susannah Tresilian as Assistant Director. Smooth FM acts as the show's Media Sponsor. VERTIGO contains nudity and is recommended for ages 16 and over.
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