Review: Single White Female at the Liverpool Playhouse ****

Single White Female was one of several psychological thrillers that put the fear of God into cinemagoers in the late 80s and early 90s, alongside films like Fatal Attraction and The Hand that Rocks the Cradle.

And this new stage version of surely the second bloodiest flat share after Shallow Grave has a hint of both the infamous bunny boiler tale AND vengeful nanny vehicle about it.

Rebecca Reid’s modern-day adaptation is described as ‘based on’ the original John Lutz novel/Jennifer Jason Leigh and Bridget Fonda flick, and I’d add a ‘loosely’ to that. While it has the same very basic structural arc, the plot diverges from the original and its characters’ circumstances and motivations are often distinctly different.

Following her divorce from a feckless addict husband, tech start up boss Allie (Lisa Faulkner) and her stroppy teenage daughter Bella (Amy Snudden) move into a decrepit high rise flat which is just down the corridor from Allie’s business partner and gay bestie Graham (Andro – recently seen in Shake it Up Baby at the Epstein Theatre).

Lights flicker, things go bump in the night…and day, and that’s even before Allie, having been informed by her ex Ben (Jonny McGarrity) that he’s slashing maintenance payments because he’s got his new young girlfriend pregnant - what a charmer, advertises for a lodger to share the rent.

Above: Bella (Amy Snudden) and Allie (Lisa Faulkner). Top: Faulkner with Kym Marsh as Hedy. Photos by Chris Bishop.

Enter, stage right, Hedra (Kym Marsh), a supposedly globetrotting fashion photographer who proves an empathetic ear and seems to have a way of connecting with Bella who is struggling with being bullied by the mean girls at her exclusive school.

But is the ever-present ‘Hedy’ the support and stay that Allie believes? Or is she an obsessive, psychopathic cuckoo in the nest? I think we all know the answer to that.

Faulkner displays vulnerability as woman abandoned to juggle career and parenthood amid choppy uncharted waters, while Marsh is deliciously menacing as the manipulative lodger with a mysterious past who slowly insinuates herself, serpent-like, into the family home and the heart of the mother-daughter relationship. Her sinister stillness in the first half is particularly unnerving and effective.

Amid the central plot, Reid’s adaptation also considers contemporary questions of digital privacy and cyber bullying, (non-sexual) grooming, personal boundaries, the isolation and loneliness of modern-day life, and, of course, identity theft – which in our world of online oversharing and AI tools is frighteningly easy to do and difficult to counter.

Above: Allie (Lisa Faulkner) and Hedy (Kym Marsh). Photo by Chris Bishop

It’s a landscape few of us around at the turn of the 90s, being frightened in a dark cinema, could have imagined. And I'd argue it's not viewing the past with rose-tinted specs to suggest it was a happier, less oppressive time before the tyranny of digital devices.

Directed by Gordon Greenberg, Single White Female is a very enjoyable and pacy psychological drama which morphs into more of a roiling melodrama as the second half gathers pace. Remember, the devil may wear Prada, but the truly unhinged wield Louboutin.

The claustrophobia of designer Morgan Large’s high-rise living/kitchen room set is augmented by Jason Taylor’s lighting and Max Pappenheim’s sound design.

Scene transitions are accompanied by the pulsing of rectangular coloured LED framing alongside sharp bursts of dramatic contemporary songs (evoking a sort-of Psycho slashing feel), while elsewhere Pappenheim crafts a suitably unsettling soundscape.