Hitchcock Blonde ( Archived )

Reviews

newspaper review

Pictured: Fiona Glascott, David Haig; William Hootkins, Rosamund Pike

Photography by Gautier Deblonde
Director Terry Johnson
Design and Video Design: William Dudley, Lighting: Simon Corder, Sound: Ian Dickinson.

Cast: Fiona Glascott, David Haig, William Hootkins, Owen McDonnell, Rosamund Pike,

with Alexander Delamere and Victoria Gay

…Ambitiously, [Terry] Johnson interweaves three different time zones. In 1999, we see a middle-aged media professor and his young student decamping to his Greek island villa to try to piece together the few surviving reels of an early Hitchcock work. Forty years earlier, we watch as Janet Leighs body double for the shower scene in Psycho falls under the intense scrutiny of the movie-maker himself. And eventually, we get to see a re-creation of the lost 1919 Hitchcock film that may (or may not) explain the source of the directors fixation with persecuted blondes.

…although Johnsons play is overly referential and goes down too many side alleys, it is perceptive and funny about the gap between celluloid dreams and reality. This Hitchcock is a sad figure who achieves through the camera a physical intimacy denied to him in life. In the same way, David Haigs wonderfully observed professor gets close to his adored student only through the restoration of a few frames of desiccated film. Obsession, Johnson implies, is a poor substitute for love, and scopophilia a thin alternative to sex.

Another director might have been more ruthless with the text. But Johnsons production has enormous visual panache thanks to William Dudleys video designs, which, in their sweeping shots of Greek Islands, echo his dazzling work on The Coast of Utopia. Haigs melancholy, late-flowering lust is sharply offset by Fiona Glascotts astringency as his semiotically gifted student. And William Hootkinss astonishing recreation of Hitchcock, down to the jutting lower lip and porpoise-like walk, is radiantly countered by Pikes air of damaged beauty.

The plays insidious fascination, though, lies in its suggestion that theatre, as much as film, turns us all into furtively guilt spectators.

Michael Billington, THE GUARDIAN 7 April 2003 (Four Stars)

The great director makes several appearances in Hitchcock Blonde, cutting a wonderfully wierd figure as he trundles heftily across the stage, or delicately picks apart a series of Dover soles, or drops fastidious word after fastidious word with a staccato clunk. Think of a pernickety bulldozer, and you have the funny yet sinister effect William Hootkinss Hitch creates as he bears down on Rosamund Pike as the unnamed blonde he has asked to strip naked and act out the body shots for the murdered Janet Leigh in Psycho.

But Hitch isnt the plays primary movie maniac. Helped by clever film effects from William Dudley, Johnsons production switches between 1959, when Psycho was made, and the year 1999, with the odd side-trip to 1919. Thats because the true protagonist, David Haigs earnest Alex, is an academic and Hitchcock expert who has discovered a cache of 80-year-old celluloid from Gainsborough Studios in, of all places, a Greek island. And thats why the action somewhat improbably fast-cuts from London to Kalithia and on to Hollywood.

Johnsons subject is a love of illusion that escalates into voyeurism and sick romanticism. When Pikes gorgeous, vulnerable but tough and determined blonde goes one step too far, and forces Hitch to handle the breast shes baring for his private screen test, the aloof geniuss control disintegrates in horror. And when Nicola gets serious about the affair shes unwillingly started with Alex. The academic shrinks away too. For him, only films fulfil ones dark, elusive needs.

Hitchcock Blonde is about male kinks and, as it turns out, the female hurt, self-hurt and violence they cause. Its not as seamlessly constructed or intellectually well-integrated as Johnson must hope, but its finely written and acted and it constantly teases and surprises. What was the abortive movie Hitchcock shot in 1919? Im not telling you. What happened to that unnamed blonde in 1959? Prepare yourself for some grand guignol and the beginnings of a cover-up that threaten to out-Hitchcock himself. Prepare yourself for plenty of educated fun.

Benedict Nightingale, THE TIMES 7 April (Four Stars)

Terry Johnsons Hitchcock Blonde is a big, bold adventure of a play, which, with witty eloquence, portrays the great filmmaker as an impotent, misogynistic, broken-hearted voyeur for whom film was akin to sexual revenge. No wonder, in Johnsons view, Hitchcock plunged his cool, blonde heroines into bloodbaths. This finely acted drama is also a comic fantasy, seductively using William Dudleys video design and holograms.

Johnson is not only concerned with the enigmatic character of Alfred Hitchcock, delectably impersonated by near-look-alike William Hootkins, who, with his ponderous, bass, sepulchral voice, cuts a repellent, mesmerising figure.

In a contest of sexual manners, Haigs excellent, self-deprecating Alex tricks Nicola into having sex with him. But then – as if in answer to a middle-aged mans erotic fantasy – she falls for him while he goes limp. Alexs exploitative relationship, buy turns diffident and callous, schematically parallels Hitchcocks treatment of two actress blondes in 1919 and 1959. Modern man, Johnson accuses, exploit women for their own ends or to get their end away. Such a bald accusation does not, however, convey Hitchcock Blondes ambition or technical ingenuity.

The scene on the Greek island, where Nicola and Alex elucidate the canisters seminal contents, begins to merge with one in Hitchcocks inner sanctum where the director takes advantage of Rosamund Pikes over-refined blonde, who is auditioning for more than nudity. Surrealistic fantasy, when the Blonde batters and murders her faithless husband becomes her form of therapy. She, rather as Hitchcock with his depictions of women horrifically abused, appeases her anger and anguish.

Nicholas de Jongh, EVENING STANDARD 7 April

Terry Johnsons new play is dazzlingly clever and often wonderfully funny – fans of his earlier mash-ups between popular culture and intellectualised farce would expect nothing less.

William Dudleys superbly realised video backdrop races from Alexs island hideaway to a 1959 soundstage, as Hitch himself (William Hootkins) dines Janet Leighs body double (Rosamund Pike). The storylines put parallel pressure on the sexual solipsism of men who see life more vividly through a lens. They are united by the film footage McGuffin: what is Hitchs horrible secret?

When the show is funny, which is about two-thirds of the tie, this all works splendidly. Haig applies his sure comic touch to Alexs mid-life crisis, while Hootkins offers an acutely cartoonish Hitch, moving as if on castors, speaking in cockneyed one-liners as he fillets his Dover sole. But Johnsons fealty is to his ideas more than to his characters: another director might have persuaded him to tone down a tendency to enunciate themes rather than prove them. Yet Johnsons production, complete with Bernard Herrmann strings and a stunning shower scene of its own, is never dull, Hitchcock Blonde overreaches itself, but its the kind of disappointment that other playwrights would kill to achieve.

Dominic Maxwell, TIME OUT 9-16 April 2003

There are all kinds of technical coups uniting theatrical and cinematic devices, and William Dudleys designs, developing the virtuosic use of video he explored in Stoppards Coast of Utopia trilogy, are often thrilling.

There is one great scene, involving that old standby, the lured victim who keeps getting up again, and Hootkins us wonderfully watchable as Hitch – obese, pompous, every detail right from the protruding lower lip to the waddle of a walk. Pike offers great value, too, as the blonde body double who isnt nearly as dumb or adorable as she looks; and David Haig and Fiona Glascott are excellent as the contemptibly craven film expert and the spunky Irish object of his desire.

Charles Spencer, THE DAILY TELEGRAPH 8 April

Terry Johnsons new Hitchcock Blonde is a real mess but take I recommend it. Its the kind of mess thats richer than several perfect plays.

Johnson has the kind of postmodern mind that feasts off figures who have achieved both popular and classic status: Marilyn Monroe meeting Einstein (Insignificance) fans resurrecting British TV comedy (in Dead Funny) the stars of the Carry On films (in Cleo, Camping, Emmanuelle and Dick). His new Hitchcock Blonde alternates between two periods. In 1999, Alex, a 47-year-old film lecturer, is trying to seduce his student Nicola while she assists him in analysing the remains of a unique reel of an unknown 1919 Hitchcock film. In 1959, Hitch himself is interviewing an unknown blonde whom he will film – in first a movie he leaves unfinished, and then in some home-movie footage.

Hitchcocks women: like Dickenss, like Picassos, they get under our skin even as they annoy us or strike us as inadequate. Like Dickens, like Picasso, Hitch has been widely accused of misogyny; and yet often he makes us see male-female relations from the womens point of view. He shows us heroism and anguish in guilty, callow women; callousness and weakness in strong, ardent men. Johnsons play is interestingly fixated on Hitchs own later fixation with lightweight blondes – it doesnt try to do justice to such more substantial early heroines as Madeleine Carroll or Ingrid Bergman and its subtle enough to make its own two blonde heroines surprise us. We dont expect the reckless young Nicola to become compassionate, desperate, self-lacerating, and we dont expect the 1959 blonde to attempt to murder her husband. But they do.

Much of Hitchcock Blonde is both funny and suspenseful. And it has some classic moments that enlarge the ambiguities of Hitchcock for us. One is when the 1959 blonde tells her husband what its like to be filmed nude by Hitchcock. She makes the director sound like a voyeur, and yet shes both glorified (Im lit like cut glass) and excited (nude on set, she has an orgasm). In another, we see a spectral blonde bathing in the shower. Is she Nicola? Is she Janet Leigh? For a moment, shes Venus herself summoning him. Johnson makes this transcendent by accompanying it with the most yearning, sad music from Vertigo: that film about second chances. Alex, still clothed, joins her in the shower. As he does so – true to Hitchcock – the lady vanishes.

Alastair Macaulay, FINANCIAL TIMES 9 April 2003