Well, howdy
I have emerged from under my pile of leaves. Thank you for your patience at this difficult time
I could not tell you why anyone thought it was a good idea to put the film High Noon onstage.
What I’ve seen
In the world premiere production, running at the Harold Pinter until March 6, Billy Crudup takes on the role of ageing Marshall Will Kane, just married to a Quaker woman, Amy Fowler (the excellent Denise Gough), and about to hang up his badge in favour of a quiet life ringing up the price of potatoes in a general store.
Until, that is, news arrives that the murderous Frank Miller, whom Kane put away, oh, some years ago, like no more than five, can’t remember, is about to roll into town on the noon train, seeking vengeance. And Kane, of course, being an honourable man, must face him down rather than hightail it out of there with his baffled new wife. Sigh. Bloody men, honestly.
I did wonder how they were going to put a Western, typically the most atmosphere-reliant, sparse-of-script form of movie, on stage, and the answer is with incessant talking that feels completely out of place in this dusty milieu. We establish in the first three minutes of the play that Will Kane is a man of few words, and then he doesn’t shut up for the rest of the night.
Plays of course require more words than films, because you don’t have any of the visual or audio tricks to fall back on, but that doesn’t make this a good idea. And I know it’s a Western, but surely in place of endless archetypes an actual character or two could have been spun out of all this chat about whether or not it’s the town’s problem that there’s about to be a vile murderer in their midst. A clock runs down throughout (in large leaps, in fact, if you happen to watch it, which I’m afraid I found myself doing several times, despite the short running time of just under two hours) which at least kept my spirits up.
Tonally the show’s all over the place. The original film was a commentary on McCarthyism, a look at what happens when a community under pressure turns its back on what’s right, and writer Eric Roth has expanded on the screenplay to very obviously dig into Trump’s increasingly lawless America.
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It’s a totally valid exercise, but somehow, the occasional prods at the American political class (“what’s it coming to when you can’t trust the people you vote for?” etc) just come across as glib. There are a few songs, or snatches of them – mostly Bruce Springsteen, oddly enough – and the odd outbreak of dancing, but they mainly seem to serve the purpose of covering a scene change rather than gelling with the rest of the show.
Gough, of course, lights up the stage whenever she’s on it which, is nowhere near enough. The best scene is probably the conversation between Amy and her husband’s former lover, Helen Ramirez (Rosa Salazar), in which the two women manage somehow to elevate the pedestrian script beyond its heavy clunkiness. Neither actress is given enough to do to showcase their impressive abilities.
And among all this conversation, taking place on Tim Hatley’s oppressively tall, slatted wood set (through which Neil Austin’s lighting design looks mighty fine, I must say) there’s very little room for texture, heat, atmosphere. No real, prickling sense of the genuine danger and desperation of these edgelands, that can turn from civilisation to savagery in a moment, and where the rule of law has to fight tooth and nail to be considered, let alone upheld.
