Review: Double Indemnity at the Liverpool Playhouse ***

The 1927 murder trial of housewife Ruth Snyder and her lover Henry Judd Gray was a sensation - and among the phalanx of press in the New York courtroom were two writers who would go on to use it as inspiration for fictional tales.

Journalist Sophie Treadwell revisited the murderous crime in her 1928 play Machinal.

And then in 1936, fellow hack James M Cain produced his novel Double Indemnity, the cautionary tale of an insurance agent and a discontented wife who together plot the ‘perfect’ murder.

Most people probably know the story not from the novel but from the 1944 Oscar-nominated Billy Wilder film, whose screenplay was penned by the great Raymond Chandler.

Tom Holloway has turned to Cain’s source text for his wordy stage adaptation which is visiting the Playhouse this week as part of a national tour.

Walter Huff (Ciaran Owens) is a confident and ambitious insurance salesman who meets the cool and collected Californian Phyllis Nirdlinger (Mischa Barton, making her UK stage debut) when he visits her family home with the purpose of persuading her businessman husband to renew his car insurance policy.

He’s also the narrator of the noirish story, breaking the fourth wall from the off to engage we, the audience, in what we’re about to see – including, somewhat audaciously, quoting Hamlet at us.

“What a piece of work is a man.” Well, quite. And indeed, what a piece of work is a woman too it seems, as within the blink of an eye Phyllis somehow has an enamoured Huff not only eating out of her hand but planning a dastardly crime which, if they pull it off, will net them both a hefty financial reward.

Perhaps Huff should have paid attention not to Hamlet but to Touchstone, who said “the fool doth think he is wise”.

Above: Walter Huff (Ciaran Owens), insurance company boss Mr Norton (Joseph Langdon) and Barton Keyes (Martin Marquez). Top: Owens with Mischa Barton as Phyllis Nirdlinger. Photos by Manuel Harlan.

Certainly, while the initial crime might go to carefully plotted plan, Huff soon discovers that he’s not in control of the aftermath and that the Bonnie to his Clyde has no intention of a happily ever after which involves both of them.

In addition, his colleagues at General Fidelity are busy trying to find ways of invalidating the hefty ‘double indemnity’ life insurance policy taken out in the name of Herbert Nirdlinger. Huff's immediate boss Barton Keyes (the excellent Martin Marquez) definitely smells a rat.

There’s also a connected sub-plot involving Nirdlinger’s daughter from his first marriage (Sophia Roberts) and her silent boyfriend Nino (Joseph Langdon).

Thus, all the elements are in place for what is less a whodunit and more a will-they-get-away-with-it.

Yet somehow it ends up feeling a bit…unsatisfactory, a feeling which emerges early on because there’s no palpable spark of attraction between Huff and Phyllis, no sense of frisson or chemistry or lust that might drive him to take the risk of plotting a murderous crime. Which just leaves greed, and perhaps the thrill of the ‘game’. What a putz!

Above: Sophia Roberts as Lola Nirdlinger and Joseph Langdon as Nino. Photo by Manuel Harlan.

It doesn’t help that none of the main protagonists are particularly likeable or sympathetic – Barton’s femme fatale Phyllis is icy and opaque, Oliver Ryan’s husband is tetchy and standoffish, and Huff himself, while an engaging narrator, is a cocky, moral vacuum. It makes it a challenge to invest in any of their fates.

Indeed, sometimes what is happening on the story’s periphery is more interesting – including the cracking scene at the start of the second half where callow company boss Mr Norton (Langdon again, in a much more voluble role), insurance gumshoe Keyes and Huff are debating how to handle the policy claim that could well bankrupt the business.

Marquez enlivens every scene he appears in, and his dogged and honest insurance man is an enjoyable foil to Owens’ sardonic adventurer (who, to me at least, has a touch of the Richard Nixon about him).

Together they bring Holloway’s hardboiled dialogue vividly to life.

Gillian Saker deserves a mention too as Nettie, the diligent and exasperated company secretary who is as at least as astute as her boss Mr Keyes.

Meanwhile Josh Gadsby’s lighting, Dan Balfour’s sound and Ti Green’s set design – a sort of concrete or possibly iron bunker with an angled perspective, tucked in the lee of LA’s old ‘Hollywoodland’ sign - combine to create a suitably atmospheric and claustrophobically 1930s noirish backdrop for the action.