QPAC AND KAY & MCLEAN PRODUCTIONS PRESENT BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT WITH WARNER BROS. THEATRE VENTURES ORIGINALLY PRODUCED BY KAY & MCLEAN PRODUCTIONS IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE MELBOURNE THEATRE COMPANY PROMOTION KIT CONTACTS PRODUCERS ANDREW KAY AND LIZA MCLEAN Producer LIZA MCLEAN KAY & MCLEAN PRODUCTIONS – Andrew Kay and Liza McLean E: [email protected] M: +61 418 781 033 Director Simon Phillips Playwright Carolyn Burns W: northbynorthwesttheplay.com Dramaturg Simon Phillips Lighting Designer Nick Schlieper Set Design Simon Phillips & Nick Schlieper For a copy of the script and information about the Costume Designer Esther Marie Hayes rights and the technical information related to touring Composer Ian McDonald the English production of North By North West or Audio Visual Designer Josh Burns alternatively staging the production in your theatre Production Photographer Jeff Busby, Australia please contact Liza McLean Production Photographer Nobby Clark, UK Screenwriter Ernest Lehman Featured Original Film Music Bernard Herrmann QPAC PUBLICITY Publicist : Cindy Ullrich Developed by Kay & McLean Productions with Simon Brace yourself to be whisked across America, from the E: [email protected] Phillips and Carolyn Burns, North By Northwest had skyscraper canyons of New York City to the Black Hills its stage premiere in 2015 with the Melbourne Theatre of South Dakota, following advertising executive Roger P: 07-3840-7589 Company at the Playhouse Theatre, Arts Centre O Thornhill in his desperate quest to clear his name. Melbourne. In 2016, in association with Arts Centre Everything you will recall from the original Hitchcock Melbourne, Kay & McLean Productions presented North film, from drunken car rides down twisting roads, a love By Northwest for a second time in Melbourne, on the affair on a train, to the famous cliff hanger ending on stage of the State Theatre. Mount Rushmore is recreated live on stage. How this is achieved? Well that would be ruining the surprise! You’ll need to come to the theatre to see for yourself. The production was a hit with audiences and critics alike and so plans commenced for the role out of the live stage play of North By Northwest for the international Just as in 1959, when Alfred Hitccock stretched the market. technical resources of cinema to make the greatest chase movie of all time, Simon Phillips and the creative team continue to push the technical resources of theatre Andrew Kay and Liza McLean of Kay & McLean to present Carolyn Burn’s thrilling stage adaptation. Productions are delighted to have joined forces with Theatre Royal Bath Productions to remount the stage play with a British acting company as part of the 2017 Summer Season in Bath under the Artistic Directorship of Jonathan Church. The short season in Bath was an opportunity to showcase the production for the UK, West End and touring market ongoing. Following this season, the Bath production travelled to Toronto and played a six week run as part of the 2017 Mirvish subscription season at the Alexander Theatre, Toronto., showcasing for North America. BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT WITH WARNER BROS. THEATRE VENTURES ORIGINALLY PRODUCED BY KAY & MCLEAN PRODUCTIONS IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE MELBOURNE THEATRE COMPANY 2017 REVIEWS HHHHH HHHHH HHHHH HHHH✩ “SLICK, WRY, CLEVER!” “HITCHOCK’S GLAMOROUS “BRILLIANT A-GRADE “IT’S SLICK AND SMART….A HOOT!” Daily Mail UK THRILLER!” ENTERTAINMENT.” The Times, UK Daily Mail, UK Herald Sun, Australia “CLEVER, ...SUSPENSEFUL, … HHHH✩ HHHH✩ “PLAYFUL, SMART AND INGENIOUS” ENTIRELY SILLY” “THOROUGHLY ENTERTAINING.” “PASTICHE NOT PARODY…THE The Guardian, UK The Star, UK The Age, Australia CHIEF DELIGHT HERE IS SEEING THE FILM MADE OVER” “I WAS DELIGHTED, AS WAS THE “CHARMING….ENTERTAINING AND The Financial Times, UK REST OF THE BATH AUDIENCE, SILLY IN THE EXTREME.” “GLEEFULLY IMAGINATIVE.” BY THE WIT OF WHAT PHILLIPS The Globe, UK The Australian, Australia “ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT….. AND HIS TEAM HAVE DONE... WE INGENIOUS… MIND BOGGLING.” NOT ONLY SEE HOW THE TRICKS “A SUREFIRE GOOD NIGHT OUT” “INGENIOUS ….A RECREATION OF Broadwayworld, UK Limelight Magazine, Australia ARE DONE, WE DELIGHT IN THEIR THE STYLISH THRILLER, BUT WITH INGENUITY” FILMIC DEVICES THAT ADD TO THE Michael Billington The Guardian, UK LIVE FUN.” Toronto Now, Canada Production Photography Nobby Clark THE GUARDIAN 2017 REVIEWS STAGE DIRECTION: NORTH BY NORTHWEST TAKES HOLLYWOOD TO BATH THE THEATRE Michael Billington Wednesday 2 August 2017 18.00 AEST Hollywood in its infancy raided the theatre to recruit actors, writers and directors. Many of its greatest geniuses, including DW Griffith, Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles, were originally creatures of the stage. Theatre is today returning the compliment not merely by recruiting current movie stars but by becoming ever more cinematic. Robert Icke’s production of The Red Barn at the National was just like a film, with its cuts, dissolves and closeups of key images. As a lover of both theatre and cinema, I’ve always argued for their formal distinctness. I recall a doomed attempt by the RSC to stage Les Enfants du Paradis, which captured the theatricality of the original but not its physical bravura. Terry Johnson’s 2000 version of The For a start, they don’t conceal the fact we are watching Graduate, recently revived at West Yorkshire Playhouse, a re-creation of a film but rejoice in it. The great French struck me as a thin and synthetic fable without the critic André Bazin in 1951 wrote an essay on Theatre glitzy stylishness of Mike Nichols’ direction and the and Cinema in which he pointed out that cinematic haunting Simon and Garfunkel score. More recently we realism could be combined with theatrical convention: had Ivo van Hove’s production of Obsession, with Jude he cited the example of Olivier’s screen Henry V which Law, which took a masterpiece of cinematic realism by affirms the work’s stage origins rather than denying Luchino Visconti and turned it into a study in aesthetic them. Something similar happens here, in that Phillips refinement. and his co-designer, Nick Schlieper, constantly remind us of the work’s filmic source. They use the original Bernard Herrmann score. The set evokes the mechanical But I am beginning to waver in my belief in the Manhattan grid on to which Saul Bass’s credit titles separation of theatre and cinema. Earlier this year I were originally projected. On each side of the stage are caught Sally Cookson’s version of Fellini’s 1954 Oscar- recesses in which the actors deploy miniaturised models winning movie La Strada, which I found strangely filmed by a camera and projected on to an upstage moving. Obviously it couldn’t capture the film’s graphic screen: in one scene we see them rotating a tiny plastic portrait of postwar Italy with its desolate bomb sites, rock which is magnified to become the wall against scarred towns and lonely seaside shacks. What it did which the hero nearly collides as he drunkenly steers a convey was the story’s raffish, touring-circus milieu car along a hazardous cliffside road. and, through the performance of Audrey Brisson, the liberation of the waif-like Gelsomina from the grip of a travelling strongman. Catherine McCormack as Mrs Robinson in The Graduate at West Yorkshire Playhouse. Photograph: Manuel Harlan The cinematic influence on theatre goes further with a new stage version of North By Northwest, based on We not only see how the tricks are done, we delight in Hitchcock’s famous thriller, at the Theatre Royal Bath, their ingenuity. In adapting the movie, Carolyn Burns also in a Simon Phillips production first seen in Melbourne in reminds us that it owes its success as much to its writer, 2015. Ever since I saw it in a deserted Warwick cinema Ernest Lehman, as to Hitchcock. The auteur theory of in 1959, North By Northwest has been one of my all-time cinema persistently elevates the director above the favourite movies. How, I wondered, could you possibly writer but Lehman, in this story of a Madison Avenue replicate the famous aerial pursuit of Cary Grant or the ad man on the run after being mistakenly accused of celebrated climax on the carved presidential faces of murder, takes the plot of John Buchan’s The 39 Steps Mount Rushmore? And why bother, since the original is and brilliantly adapts it to the world of 1950s cold war easily available? But I admit I was delighted, as was the America. rest of the Bath audience, by the wit of what Phillips and Even the casting deliberately evokes the movie in that his team have done. many of the actors resemble the originals: Nick Sampson, for instance, has the craggy, professorial quality of Leo G Carroll as a shadowy CIA fixer. In one respect, Jonathan Watton as the pursued hero and Olivia Fines as the ambivalent Eve actually transcend their originals in that their intimate encounter in a train sleeping berth is far sexier than in the Hitchcock movie. They genuinely seem to lust after each other rather than, as Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint do, engage in bedroom banter. I am emphatically not saying the stage version of North By Northwest is better than the film, which is an imperishable masterpiece. But it is playful, smart and ingenious and it proves an important point: that, in adapting any work for another medium, it is far better to acknowledge its origins than to try and disguise them. Artistically, honesty is always the best policy. •North By Northwest is at the Theatre Royal Bath until 12 August. Box office: 01225 448844. Production Photography Nobby Clark THE TIMES THE FINANCIAL TIMES THE DAILY MAIL THE STAGE THE ENTIRE PRODUCTION FITS A CLEVER STAGING OF HITCHCOCK HIT THAT’S HEADING IN ‘CLEVERLY EXECUTED’ TOGETHER LIKE A SOPHISTICATED HITCHCOCK’S CLASSIC ONE DIRECTION..