Double Feature @ Hampstead Theatre, London
John Logan’s incredibly cleverly staged play pits pairs of actors and directors in conversation on the same stage, sometimes crossing each other as they interact. Vincent Price (Jonathan Hyde) and Michael Reeves (Rowan Polonski) in one corner, Tippi Hedren (Joanna Vanderham) and Alfred Hitchcock ( Ian McNeice) in the other. It’s riveting and uncomfortable watching with great writing and truly splendid performance from Jonathan Hyde as Price.
It’s the ‘60’s; Hitch and Hedren have just finished filming Marni. Hitch may be brilliant, but has a horribly controlling and manipulative relationship with his ‘favourite blonde’. Equally disturbing is Reeves relationship with Price — he’s insulting, demanding, distressing. Price is the only balanced one here. He’s trying to leave the set of Witchfinder General and set boundaries, keeping his self-respect. Having got Reeves to dramatically apologise, he sets about making them deliciously simple pasta and talking, making a kind of truce and peace.
Reeves is very confused, making Price part-father-figure and part love-interest/rescuer. Polonski’s depiction reveals a very fragile, hurting person battling mental health issues and the often brutal treatment of them from the time. At the same time, he’s trying to make great horrors, to direct greatly — convincing Price to say his lines again and again until he says them simply and powerfully rather than with the usual stagey vigour and swish.
More worrying is Hitch’s relationship with Hedren, controlling her clothes and styling, where and how she can smoke, what she eats, even when she leaves and how she relates to him. Hedren tries several times to leave and doesn’t — in this nocturnal ‘rehearsal’. In the same way, Hitch wants to put her in his next film ‘Mary Rose’, ironically about a woman who vanishes.
Plied with rich carbs, the worst moment is Hitch’s behaviour becomes coercive and Hedren goes too and from the front door in deep anguish, wanting to leave, but also wanting to keep her career — and enters Hitch’s bedroom. Vanderham’s face is unforgettable here as we all will her to go out the door and run, and she can’t decide what to do. Her indecisiveness is a trope — and when she does say ‘NO’ — it’s powerful.
The unpicking of creepy and then frankly disgusting and disturbing Marnie during the play has made me never want to watch it. What Hitch put Hedren through via this character is horrible — even if he did think he was bringing psychoanalysis to the big screen. And in this plau, fiction spills over from the set into real life.
Unlike Hitch, Price retains his compassion and humanity — rather than responding to Reeves offering himself, he restores his dignity with kindness and sympathy, encourages him to keep going with his creative vision. And life. It’s Price’s care for another person, without exploitation, that is a thing of beauty here. A man who loves his family and cares for people as well as desiring just to work.
Treading a similar path to The Motive and The Cue, this is a film rather than stage version, celebrating the making of movies and the creative process. I’m not sure the play quite hits all the marks it wants to make, Hedren’s character lacks depth — and it’s really down to Vanderham’s elegant, fragile, anxious mannerisms that we get any sense of who Tippi Hedren is and what’s she going through. But, overall, the play has a spectacular go, and is an intense, absorbing watch.
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