Review: North by Northwest at Liverpool Playhouse ****

How do you recreate a classic cinematic spy thriller with big screen set pieces that include an aerial attack scene and a dramatic denouement on the face of a gigantic national monument – on stage and with six people?

It’s quite the challenge. But happily, one that director Emma Rice and those endlessly inventive scamps at her Bristol-based touring theatre company Wise Children prove up to in this wily and witty adaptation at the Playhouse this week.

Rice opts to present this North by Northwest chiefly as a highly comedic espionage caper, and there’s certainly plenty of capering in its fleet-footed storytelling, delivered with dash and panache and much in the same vein as that other tale of mistaken identity and shadowy enemies, The 39 Steps.

As in Hitchcock’s 1959 screen original, Madison Avenue ad man Roger Thornhill (Ewan Wardrop) goes on the run after being mistaken for a Cold War government agent.

Thornhill becomes a reluctant hero as he seeks to evade the long arm of the law and find answers to the identity of his pursuers, and in the process his path crosses with a mysterious and sultry femme fatale Eve (Patrycja Kujawska) who may not be all she seems.

While the key character of the Professor gets relatively little screen time in Hitchcock’s film, here Rice has placed him centre stage as narrator and guide – both to the bemused Thornhill and also to the audience, breaking the fourth wall from the start to draw the auditorium into the action with conspiratorial asides.

Above: Roger Thornhill (Ewan Wardrop) on the run with fellow cast members. Top: Katy Owen's shadowy Professor. Photos by Steve Tanner.

Katy Owen has endless fun as the fedora-clad spy who directs the action and exhorts the audience to ‘pay attention’. As with all the cast bar Wardrop, she also pops up as a number of other characters including an auctioneer and a questionable society hostess with vowels that are sloanier than an 80s Sloane Ranger.

Wardrop meanwhile channels the droll insouciance of Cary Grant in his performance along with a nod to other suave, well-dressed spy types like the Man from UNCLE and even 007.

The action swirls around him as he’s chased across the Midwest by Simon Oskasson and Mirabelle Gremaud’s gun-toting factotums on the instruction of their boss, enemy agent Phillip Vandamm (Karl Queensborough who also doubles as Thornhill’s overbearing mother), during which time he’s menaced by that iconic crop duster and effects a perilous rescue mission on the face(s) of Mount Rushmore.

Rice finds a host of ingenious, inspired ways to recreate the big screen action, working in tandem with Etta Murfitt’s slick and sinuous choreography and movement which brings propulsive energy to the storytelling.

Above: Thornhill (right) is chased through a field of corn by the crop duster. Photo by Steve Tanner.

And Rob Howell’s cleverly malleable set, framed with a rail of coats and line of cases along the length of the back wall, is dominated by a quartet of revolving ‘doors’ downstage which spin cast from scene to scene.

It's exhausting to watch let alone to execute over the production’s two-and-a-half hour running time, so chapeau to the six-strong cast for ensuring the action never flags.

Meanwhile the vibe of the era is amplified by a soundtrack of smooth jazz classics which the cast both dance and lip-sync to.

While it’s thoroughly entertaining stuff, playing it chiefly for laughs does leave the plot's existential questions around identity, along with other underlying themes – the pervasive sense of danger and Cold War paranoia, the reality of the ‘American Dream’, the nature of morality – relatively unexplored.

And it also means the rather earnest epilogue, where the audience is exhorted to find common ground on which to strive for a better world, feels jarringly like the plug has been pulled suddenly on a particularly lively party.