High Noon - Review

Harold Pinter Theatre, London

**

Written by Eric Roth

Based on Carl Foreman's motion picture

Directed by Thea Sharrock

Billy Crudup and Denise Gough

The translation of High Noon from Western to West End is a gamble as risky as awaiting the arrival of a convicted vengeful murderer on the midday train. But where Fred Zinnemann’s 1952 Oscar-winning masterpiece told a wondrous story, Eric Roth’s debut stage-play guns down the legendary yarn, leaving the exquisite original bleeding in the dust. 

Zinnemann relied on immaculate performance, cinematography and music for his screen masterpiece. Roth condenses that narrative into a claustrophobic work of trashy pulp fiction that’s very heavy on exposition and includes a liberal use of foul language that jars when set against the beauty of Carl Foreman's movie screenplay.

Billy Crudup delivers a decent turn as marshal Will Kane, a man forced to confront his nemesis Frank Miller, and on his wedding day too. Opposite Crudup and perhaps the evening’s biggest disappointment is Denise Gough’s two-dimensional and cliched turn as Kane’s bride Amy Fowler. The only performance that comes close to matching Crudup’s work is from Rosa Salazar as the town’s bar-owner and hooker, Helen Ramirez. Hers is a role of curious complexity that Salazar delivers with compassion and sensitivity. Elsewhere, too many of the cast are doubled or even tripled up in the roles they are allocated - that at times is more of a confusing distraction than an advancement of the plot.

Roth's tinkering with the political nuances of the movie is clumsy. Where Foreman's writing offered up a poignant allegory upon the evils of McCarthyism under which he had been persecuted, Roth (no-doubt inadvertently) sometimes sets his Kane on a pedestal alongside Donald Trump and Rudolph Giuliani, in his references to how effectively the marshal had cleaned up the town's historic crime problem. 

The usually brilliant Tim Hatley has designed a set of wooden slats that creates an effective suggestion of the brilliant sunshine of America’s frontierland, but is otherwise too nondescript an affair to effectively portray the tumbleweed nature of the town. Hatley does however conjure up an enchanting arrival of the eponymously climactic steam train - a staging that leaves one wishing he could have been as equally inspirational in his far more bland railway designs that are currently the backdrop to Starlight Express. And quite why Roth has chosen to pepper his script with snatches of Bruce Springsteen and Ry Cooder has to remain a mystery.

A clock sits atop the stage counting down the show’s 100 minutes. With the play lasting a quarter of an hour longer than the movie, those minutes drag. If High Noon is to mark a trend of Westerns being transformed into stage productions then may I respectfully suggest that Mel Brooks is approached for the rights to Blazing Saddles.

Runs until March 6th

Photo credit: Johan Persson