WANNA BE IN MOVIES? REALLY? BRRRR!
We open in a chilly Suffolk cottage in the rain (I am tonight probably the only person here to have come direct from a chilly Suffolk cottage, in rain. Call it Method Criticking).
But in this case there is a sinister banging on the door, which opens to reveal – aaaagh! Jonathan Hyde as a gloriously convincing Vincent Price, veteran horrror movie star in a bad mood. He is suffering from “irreconciliable differences” personal and artistic, with the 24 year old director Michael Reeves (Rowan Polonski), and citing clause 17 paragraph 5 of his contract to get out of the film “Witchfinder General”.
Reeves thinks he is making an art movie about the truth of human violence – hangings, rape, the rack “for serious cinema is about discomfort” . Price reckons its just a job, knowing that the studio plans to market it as horror – like his Edgar Allen Poe films – and that a memo instructs the director with demands like “girl’s tits nude, and blood on tits”.
Having been reprimanded for overacting all day by this whippersnapper, he wants out. Reeves pleads, but then. explodes into “Go back to America you old side of ham, I’ll get Donald Pleasance like I wanted in the first place”. But the power is not with him, and he pleads again. Funny, but already uneasy.
Then, unseen by either, in the same set we are in a similar cottage – Alfred Hitchcock’s fanciful bit of olde England in LA – where three years earlier the master is alone with his tightly contracted discovery, Tippi Hedren the last Hitchcock Blonde: Joanna Vanderham exquisitely lit in iceblue silk suit, respectful but rightly wary of the man’s toadlike vastness and legendary power (Ian McNeice is mesmerisingly unnerving).
So the sharply comic mood changes, though at the same time the other pair – Price with the upper hand, Reeves nervy and troubled – continue their evening, the veteran taking over cooking. There is no confusion in Janathan Kent’s nimble direction, though sometimes fragments of director-actor dialogue in parallel cause a moments synchronicity.
This in ninety minutes John Logan’s thoughtful – and much researched – play interweaves two actor director relationships at points of crisis. It is full of ideas but sketchy – even a bit cartoonish – in character – which given the pace and interest did not particularly bother me. Themes of age and experience are reversed, but within each pair the power shifts. In a startling moment Reeves (who died young of an overdose a couple of years later) is trying to tone down Price’s usual grandiosely sinister manner in a condemnation scene, and babbles half crazily about the world’s horrors. A silence, and suddenly Price gives the condemnation speech coldly, matter of fact, chilling. Nazi. As Reeves had wanted.
Hitchcock meanwhile is also building mastery, more horribly, over Hedren: very Harvey Weinstein, very nasty. He will make her immortal on that screen. But the immortality he wants is trauma – torment – as it always is with Hitch and beautiful icy blondes. All his films he says are the same – “kiss kiss, kill kill, in any order” – and Marnie will end with a kiss , though only via the famous cabin scene of marital rape. He needs her caught in trauma, her nakedness the moment the male “creates” her. The rapist is like a director for whom the actor’s welfare does not matter: the theory, a patiarchal sub- artistic wank that still exists, is that the greatest screen moments caught forever like flies in amber can come out of real abuse. Especially of a beautiful woman
That could hardly be more topical. Vanderham however rounds brilliantly on Hitchcock in this play though, giving Hedren a very modern moment of defiant rage, turning the tables, telling the old goat that in seducing her he is just the ugly boy in school screaming to be Clark Gable, wanting a co-star more than a whore, a trophy. And that people will only laugh at him for it.
Pow! Cut! And that’s a wrap. Though in the 1960s it probably wasn’t, theres satifaction in it. And a play that leaves you thinking, not least about cinema. A good one for BAFTA week.
Hampsteadtheatre.com to 16 march
Rating 4
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