Review: The Talented Mr Ripley
Review: The Talented Mr Ripley
Twisted tale of obsession given a meta twist for the stage
Three Stars
Image credit: Mark Senior
This year marks the 70th anniversary of Patricia Highsmith’s iconic novel, The Talented Mr Ripley. The dark psychological thriller clearly still resonates today, having recently been made into a Netflix series with Andrew Scott, and now a stage adaptation. Before that came an Oscar-nominated film with Matt Damon, Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow back in 2000.
The tale tells of Tom Ripley, an insecure nobody who is sent to Italy to persuade Dickie, an old acquaintance, to return home to America on the behest of his wealthy father and ailing mother. On arriving in Italy, Tom becomes captivated by Dickie’s charm and beauty, but tensions mount with his growing jealousy of Dickie’s world and despair at his indifference towards him.
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A big part of the draw of the film is the depiction of a glamorous 1950s Italy. The Netflix adaptation, simply called Ripley, meanwhile, is portrayed in monochrome, giving it a Hitchcockian intensity to match the psychological depths of the story. So how does it adapt for the stage? The answer, it seems, is to make it as meta as possible, with Tom interrupted at various points by the voice of a director calling for retakes as if it were a film, with different outcomes played out each time. The effect is original and adds interest, but it comes at the expense of pacing. The production feels long and some points are laboured.
The staging is simple, with a raised platform in the middle and the attractive destinations around Europe brought to life by the actors moving props to give the impression of, for example, a sailing boat at sea or pigeons pecking on the ground. But at times, it needs more visual impact. That said, neon tubes of lighting are used well to create the atmosphere of scenes such as a sunlit beach.
With such minimal staging, all eyes are on the cast. Ed McVey (The Crown) is brilliant as an anxious, hand-wringing Tom Ripley, whose dark undercurrents are made all the more disturbing by his mild demeanour. Bruce Herbelin-Earle (Free Rein; The Boys in the Boat) makes a charming and capricious Dickie Greenleaf, and Maisie Smith (EastEnders) plays Marge Sherwood as a sweet and patient friend-turned-lover. The rest of the cast do a fine job of changing characters throughout.
Ultimately, it is an enjoyable but overly long watch, with the last quarter taken up trying to explain away how the twist in the tale could be plausible – a fault of the original conceit, perhaps?
