'This spine-snapper of a stalker tale': Quentin Letts reviews Strangers On A Train at the Gielgud Theatre
Rating:
The programme for ‘Strangers on a Train’ lists no fewer than six stage managers – and you can see why. This flesh-creeper, this toe-curler, this spine-snapper of a stalker tale has some of the fastest, cleverest set changes ever attempted.
Scenery is struck and replaced within a brief whisk of the revolve. One moment we are in an office, the next it has been turned into a fairground carousel.
Add train interiors, a country house, a New York office, a dingy flat, and more – plus a blaze. Technical brilliance.
Strangers on a Train by Craig Warner and directed by Robert Allan Ackerman at the Gielgud Theatre. Laurence Fox as Guy and Jack Huston as Bruno
Patricia Highsmith’s 1950 novel was turned into a film by Alfred Hitchcock. As you may have noticed, Hitchcock tended not to gravitate towards happy endings.
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The plot, and its telling here, is as noir as a triple espresso. Talented young architect bumps into rich boozer on train. Accepts a drink. And his life is never the same.
Miranda Raison as Anne and Laurence Fox as Guy
There is a monochrome theme to the story and the staging. Lots of blacks and whites. Moody smoke at the top of a doom-laden staircase. Wispy leftovers from the steam train? This is a story about (possibly gay) obsession, inner corrosion, the ratcheting power of secrecy and unreasonable love, and the destruction of innocent onlookers. Gosh, it’s an unhappy story, even when produced so well as this Robert Allan Ackerman show.
Quentin Letts described Strangers On A Train at the Gielgud Theatre as 'technical brilliance'
Jack Huston makes rich, drunken Bruno a stammering charmer, his convivial plausibility unravelling just as slowly as his slicked, black curls.
Laurence Fox is maybe slightly less successful as architect Guy – with that Anthony Blunt face and that muffled voice, it is hard to buy him as a Fifties American thruster.
Myanna Buring burns briefly as Guy’s first wife. Miranda Raison is elegant as her successor. I liked Christian McKay’s composure as private detective Gerard.
And look, there’s Imogen Stubbs as Bruno’s dotty mother – Imo entering her Norma Desmond phase, all husky monotone and, as ever, a flash of cleavage and a neck stretched to the gods. She may not be entirely convincing but she is never less than an insistent stage presence.
No Christmas ghost story will be quite as chilling (or gripping) as this nightmare. It doesn’t half bear out the value of that old-fashioned English rule: beware talking to strangers on public transport.
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