Review
STRANGERS ON A TRAIN
Vertigo Mystery Theatre
Starring Ryan Luhning, Trevor Leigh and Adrienne Smook
Written by Craig Warner
Directed by Mark Bellamy
Runs until May 15
Vertigo Playhouse
(Tower Centre)
Although there were few crime novelists as crafty as Patricia Highsmith, it’s a safe bet that most people are more familiar with Alfred Hitchcock’s screen version of Strangers on a Train than with her book. That film has gone down in history as one of his lesser great works and inspired the darkly comic Danny DeVito picture Throw Momma From the Train. For its new production of Strangers on a Train, Vertigo Mystery Theatre employs a dramatization by Craig Warner that bears more resemblance to the source material than either of those adaptations, but even with a clever premise and solid performances, the script has a hard time staying on the rails.
When Charles Bruno (Ryan Luhning) and Guy Haines (Trevor Leigh) meet on a train, the two open up to each other in a way that only strangers can. Haines reveals that he has a two-timing wife who put the creative kibosh on his architecture career, while Bruno laments the fact that his father has tightened the purse strings on his inheritance. Fuelled by alcohol and an ambiguous moral code, Bruno suggests that each man kill off the other’s problem. Not only will it free them to lead the lives they want to, but since neither man has a motive for the crime, the police will be literally clueless. Haines doesn’t take Bruno’s proposition seriously – until his wife turns up dead. Now wracked with guilt, Haines is being pursued by Bruno to make good on his end of their deal.
Under the guise of the perfect crime, Highsmith’s story delivers a deliciously wicked setup, but the play has a tough time moving forward. It’s not a whodunit, so it relies on the tension created by Haines’s internal conflict and the unravelling of Bruno’s charismatic psychopath. The same problem plagued both screen versions of Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley. In a novel, Highsmith can take time to enter her characters’ heads, which can’t really be shown on stage or screen. While her novels are gripping, adaptations of them are difficult and even Warner, who has made a living (and won several awards for) adapting work for radio and theatre, can’t make this script work.
The upside for this production, directed by Mark Bellamy, is the cast, especially the leads. As the perpetually soused Bruno, Luhning swaggers around the stage with blissed-out abandon. Blending charisma with neurosis (and cirrhosis), his character has to be able to charm everyone in the play and that appeal flows off the stage into the audience.
With the less flamboyant character, Leigh has to work harder to match Luhning’s presence. His drawling architect is the emotional core of the play, and Leigh has to spend a good portion of it looking tortured and frustrated. While he never makes Haines as sympathetic as he needs to, he holds his own alongside Luhning.
The standout performance, however, is Adrienne Smook as Haines’s new wife Anne. Like all the secondary characters, the script gives her little to do, but Smook makes this doting wife both charming and incredibly sympathetic. She deserves credit for taking a simple character and crafting a memorable performance (much like she did in Alberta Theatre Projects’ Get Away earlier this year).
Without those strong performances to drive it, Strangers on a Train is a plodding, overly simple exploration of the duality of human nature. Everyone has good and bad within them, and when the play works best, you can see that no matter where the characters’ moral compasses are pointing, before long all their paths are converging like train tracks on the horizon. The problem is that this production takes too long to get to the end of the line. |
Copyright ©2005 FFWD. All rights reserved.