The West End’s woeful High Noon showed how hard it is to put a western on stage. How about another rugged American genre, the film noir? James M Cain’s cynical, gripping 1936 novella was sharpened for the 1944 movie by director Billy Wilder and his co-writer, Raymond Chandler. This theatrical adaptation, previously seen in a 2016 Melbourne Theatre Company version, unwisely reinstates most of the bits they trimmed or tightened for the film. Tom Holloway’s script covers the same ground but with new diluted dialogue and Oscar Toeman’s production has fatal problems with pacing.
Cain’s LA insurance salesman Walter Huff became Walter Neff on screen; Holloway restores his original name yet adds a recurring joke that others forget what he is called. It makes the point that, as crime novelist James Lee Burke has written, Cain’s characters “are ordinary people, much like ourselves”. That’s further stressed in a prologue where Huff (Ciarán Owens) amiably addresses the audience, a technique that is overused throughout and adds layers of exposition, most pertinently about a country still reeling from the Great Depression.
Lighting designer Josh Gadsby stylishly casts multiple shadows against Ti Green’s striking set design, which suggests a towering house of cards atop a bunker-like tunnel that leads into darkness. It captures the precarious, doomed scheme cooked up by Huff and Phyllis Nirdlinger (The OC’s Mischa Barton in her UK stage debut) to murder her husband and reap the payoff from a double indemnity clause in his insurance. The ending is never in doubt: Huff will wind up like every other sucker beguiled by a femme fatale. But there is no electricity between the pair and their lines lack the playful panache added to the screenplay. Never mind hard-boiled, the dialogue seldom bubbles. Some scenes overlap yet even this doesn’t provide the momentum required.
Barton is detached rather than calculating as Nirdlinger, who is too often absent from the stage and in this script repeatedly calls out society’s sexism, while Owens’ narration isn’t sufficiently jaundiced. Critically, there is no sense of a curdling romance after the killing although Owens conveys an escalating edginess and Holloway accentuates the notion that “murder doesn’t finish with the act”. The stark design does not allow much scope for nuanced locations as the furniture is wheeled on and off, with the set pieces involving a car and a train rendered in pedestrian manner.
The secondary relationships are thin: Phyllis’s husband (Oliver Ryan) is flatly irascible to all, the bond between her stepdaughter Lola (Sophia Roberts) and Huff – a weak point in both book and film – remains unconvincing. Gillian Saker is given the role of Huff’s sparky secretary but denied any decent quips. Martin Marquez comes out best as his gravel-voiced colleague Keyes, here sharing a father-son dynamic rather than the film’s bromance. Keyes is the claims investigator, played on screen by a grimacing Edward G Robinson, who is so sensitive to phoney activity that it gives him indigestion. He’d need a peppermint tea by the interval.
• At Churchill theatre, Bromley, until 25 April. Then touring until 9 May
