DIAL M FOR META

Emma Rice’s inventive adaptation
is an enjoyable ride; just don’t
expect to be transported

The cast of North by Northwest, adapted by Emma Rice, at The Old Globe in San Diego

The movies lie to us in ways the stage cannot. Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest works because the camera goes where Roger Thornhill goes, feels what he feels, and cuts away before we notice the seams. A crop-duster appears from nowhere in an empty landscape and becomes myth because the frame controls everything. Put that myth onstage and the camera disappears. What you get instead is the question that has animated Emma Rice throughout her career: what does it mean to watch human beings pretend?

Her answer is characteristically theatrical. Rather than imitate Hitchcock, she reimagines him, transforming the 1959 thriller into a playful piece of stagecraft at The Old Globe that embraces artifice instead of hiding it. Hitchcock’s relentless chase becomes, in Rice’s hands, an exuberant theatrical playground powered by seven actors, constant role changes, physical comedy, and an unapologetic delight in illusion. Some of it dazzles. Some of it explains itself before we have a chance to feel it.

(from left) Karl Queensborough as Phillip Vandamm, Simon Oskarsson as Valerian, Danny Collins as Roger Thornhill, and Bryony Pennington as Anna

For anyone who somehow missed the film, advertising executive Roger Thornhill is mistaken for a government spy and pursued across America by foreign agents determined to kill him. Along the way he falls for the mysterious Eve Kendall, who may or may not be working against him. I first saw the movie in a high school sophomore film class, projected from a battered 16mm print. Even on a pull-down classroom screen, the New York locations had scale, the action sequences genuine bite, and Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint generated a chemistry no teacher’s introduction could have prepared a roomful of teenagers to appreciate. That memory—not merely the screenplay—is what Rice’s adaptation has to compete with.

With her company Kneehigh, Emma Rice built a reputation on source material that fights back. We’ve seen her work this trick before in Tristan & Yseult and Brief Encounter. Both productions trusted that audiences already knew where the story was headed, allowing Rice to focus less on what happens than on how it feels to watch it unfold. North by Northwest is the most plot-driven of the three and the first to let the mechanics of genre generate much of the comedy. Rather than asking whether theatre can compete with cinema, Rice asks what live performance can accomplish that film cannot. Much of the evening succeeds precisely because it never tries to duplicate Hitchcock’s camera.

Danny Collins as Roger Thornhill and Katy Owen as The Professor

Rob Howell‘s scenic and costume design does the heavy lifting. Four revolving, floor-to-ceiling doors—lined with liquor bottles along their bases—transform almost magically into hotel lobbies, train compartments, offices, and the United Nations. Every rotation feels like a new act of invention. Malcolm Rippeth‘s lighting doesn’t simply illuminate the action; it comments on it, creating what often feels less like the movie itself than a shared memory of the movie.

The production’s greatest reinvention is Katy Owen‘s Professor, reconceived as narrator, provocateur, and occasional master of ceremonies. Her timing has a Kathryn Hunter-like strangeness, a contained mischief that makes the first of several fourth-wall ruptures land. The first few interruptions are delightful. The problem is that Rice has decided there can never be just a few. Owen narrates almost continuously, and Rice keeps asking her to tell the audience what to feel about moments the staging could simply show them. The crop-duster sequence needs a narrator because the alternative is an actual airplane. A hotel room scene does not. By Act II, the device has stopped being a solution and become the default setting, and a show that could trust its actors to carry a beat instead hands the audience a tour guide.

The cast of North by Northwest

The audience participation compounds the problem: a Simon Says game mid-scene, call-and-response exchanges, and a welcome-back greeting after intermission. These communal rituals feel entirely at home in Rice’s earlier work. Here they repeatedly interrupt a thriller whose suspense already provides its own momentum. Every pause reminds us of the production’s mechanics just as the chase begins building speed.

Grant’s screen persona was effortless, unbothered, the surface of a man too smooth to register fear even while running for his life. Recreating that surface without a camera to find it for him is its own kind of problem. Danny Collins carries it as well as anyone could. He delivers an unexpected musical number midway through with a wry half-smile that says, yes, I know this is happening, and no, I will not explain it. The camera would cut around that moment. He stands inside it. Owen, notably, lets him. That’s the closest the evening comes to trusting an audience to read a face without a subtitle.

(from left) Bryony Pennington, Evangeline Dickson, Patrycja Kujawska, Simon Oskarsson, and Karl Queensborough as United Nations Workers

Patrycja Kujawska, as Eve Kendall, does something harder than seduction: she makes the character’s secrets visible as texture rather than plot. You watch her and know she is lying before you know about what. Karl Queensborough shines more brightly as Thornhill’s shrill, handbag-wielding mother than as the villain Vandamm, a surprise the film could never have managed.

Simon Oskarsson‘s Valerian arrives with a homoerotic charge he is clearly delighted to have discovered, sliding between accents and costumes with the production’s most athletic commitment. Bryony Pennington sings, tumbles, and storms through scene after scene before quietly stealing one simply by standing perfectly still while the production is loudest. It works every time. Evangeline Dickson rounds out the company across a handful of smaller roles.

Danny Collins as Roger Thornhill with the cast

The crop-duster sequence is where Rice’s argument for staging North by Northwest wins outright. Rather than trying to outdo Hitchcock’s spectacle with technology, Rice and Etta Murfitt‘s movement direction embrace theatrical simplicity. Performers dive, scatter, and dodge with the precision of silent-film comedians, turning limitation into invention. Here, Owen’s narration finally earns its place, enhancing the illusion instead of compensating for it. The sequence alone justifies bringing the film to the stage rather than simply screening it.

Elsewhere, Murfitt’s choreography borrows from the physical theatre vocabulary of Jacques Lecoq, favoring exaggerated movement, elastic bodies, and comic rhythm over Hitchcock’s taut suspense. Simon Baker‘s score, steeped in 1950s swing, gives the ensemble sequences infectious momentum somewhere between a Madison dance and gleeful absurdity. Men in trench coats and sunglasses shuffle through stylized routines that flirt with parody without tipping into spoof. The concept is fresh in Act I, though by Act II its comic vocabulary begins repeating itself.

Danny Collins as Roger Thornhill and Patrycja Kujawska as Eve Kendall

Rice wisely preserves much of Ernest Lehman’s original screenplay, trusting that its dry wit still lands more than sixty years later. It does. Then she throws the last two minutes away. Hitchcock’s ending is one of cinema’s most famous visual punchlines, cutting from the newlyweds’ embrace directly to a train entering a tunnel—a perfect, cheeky joke delivered in a single edit. Rice replaces that mischievous ending with contemporary political speeches layered over Eve’s election victory and an earnest plea for national unity. The evening has spent two acts celebrating irony, theatrical invention, and playful self-awareness. Suddenly asking the audience to receive a solemn political statement without irony feels dramatically unearned. Mount Rushmore itself is staged well; the ensemble builds the monument out of their own bodies, an inventive image in its own right. The speech bolted onto it belongs to a more solemn show than the one performed for the previous two hours.

Danny Collins as Roger Thornhill and Bryony Pennington as Anna

The Cary Grant problem, it turns out, was never really the point. The real question is whether Roger Thornhill can still hold an audience without Hitchcock’s camera guiding every glance. Collins answers that before intermission, finding an easy charm that survives even the production’s busiest moments. The rest of the show would rather be admired.

None of this should discourage anyone from seeing North by Northwest. Productions that understand exactly what they cannot accomplish—and compensate with imagination instead of imitation—are rare. Rice’s adaptation overflows with theatrical ingenuity and moments of astonishing stagecraft. Go for the revolving doors, the brilliantly conceived crop-duster, Collins’ effortless wit, and Owen’s delightfully eccentric Professor.

Just don’t let her tell you what it all means.

Danny Collins as Roger Thornhill and Patrycja Kujawska as Eve Kendall

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photos by Rich Soublet II

North by Northwest
The Old Globe
Donald and Darlene Shiley Stage, 1363 Old Globe Way in San Diego
2 hours and 20 minutes with intermission
Tues–Sun (see website for varying curtain times)
ends on August 2, 2026
for tickets ($38 and up), call 619.234.5623 or visit The Old Globe

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