Double Feature - Hampstead

It’s a bit dark and oppressive in parts

Some of it slightly loses focus

Elements are too clever for their own good

A few very acerbic lines and exchanges

One or two very uncomfortable moments

Overall it’s very film like in execution and the set and production standards are top notch

Btw, for anyone interested in a bargain ticket, I'm offering a £10 stalls seat for next Saturday's matinee, ie Saturday 17 February - see Noticeboard. I'm gutted to have to give it up but it's the only day a friend & I can both see something else further afield & he won't forego his football match on another Saturday when I can also go. No £10 seats available now nor anything close to that due to dynamic pricing.

Anyone else has seen it? Torn between this and the Almeida's King Lear.

I wish, only have space for one on this trip. Very curious about this one.

I'm going this evening. I wasn't sure either but the story is right up my street. For tickets this week I used a £15 offer from Time Out so shouldn't feel short changed if I don't like it...

Hope you report

Tonight ran 19:36 to 21:05.

I'm a film nut. I regard Alfred Hitchcock as one of the greatest directors of all time, and it's madness that he never won a Best Director Oscar. I'm quite fond of camp horror too, although I've never seen Michael Reeve's Witchfinder General, something I need to rectify.

So Double Feature, involving Hitchcock and leading lady Tippi Hedren in 1964, and Reeves with his star, Vincent Price, in 1968, has much to interest me, and the focus is on the power dynamics between each pairing of actor and director and how abusive those relationships can be.

Playwright John Logan chooses to side squarely with Tippi Hedren's autobiography allegations that she published some time after Hitchcock's death, even though other accounts suggest Hitchcock was far from being a Weinstein and was misunderstood in his methods (that play badly by modern mores) for getting the best performances from his leading ladies. Whatever the truth, it is fascinating watching the two stories which play out simultaneously in the same space, an English country cottage that is either in the middle of the Universal Studios Hollywood lot or the English countryside, depending on the tale. (The set design is detailed and well done, with a very extravagant shift -- literally -- that occurs late on.)

There is some good acting on display. Three of the characters are familiar and their mannerisms, if not quite the voices, are spot on. Actually that's not quite right, Joanna Vanderham as Tippi is mesmerisingly brilliant as the Hitchcock blonde, voice and all. The unknown is 24-year-old director Michael Reeves, who would live only another year. Rowan Polonski captures well the sense of a career-minded individual with so much to give yet hamstrung by personal struggles.

It's an interesting play, if not a great one, and it's well executed.

Four stars.

One act: 19:36-21:05

Well that figures, as Reeves's character is desperately trying to make something unlike Price's previous camp horror outings in the face of studio opposition. That's a big strand here.

This seemed to me to be an unusually smart concept. For architecture, witness quite the array of contrasts and opposites, parallels and mirrors, the absolute and situational empowerment of all 4 protagonists, vulnerability/flaws, emotional chess. And .. their choices.

In one sense, it’s a nuanced discussion piece.

In this form, it’s a work I can admire rather than, say, a piece you might bond with. I’m sure it will pop into my head for a while to come.

It’s fully developed and perfectly fine. I’m not a pro so I can’t say that tweaks could help, though maybe Hitch could be a little warmer and appealing. That’s obv. difficult given what’s in play (and personally the man playing him is typecast, I hope not for others). Maybe it was an absence of presence (with the Hitch character). Pass ..

I LOVED this!

One of the Double Features is more of a thriller, the other more of a cerebral but funny conversation.

The first one mostly makes you feel something, the second mostly makes you think something.

Since the two pieces, both about relations between directors and actors in the film industry, interwoven, are so complementary, reflecting each other, it all works very well together.

The actors are uniformly superb, though there is no doubt that it is Joanna Vanderham's astonishing portrayal of Tippi Hedren that is key to making this exciting.

Some spoilers follow. . .

If you lined up the 4 real life people depicted here by John Logan, there's no doubt that Hitchcock was the most objectively powerful person in the industry (one of the few directors the public could name, a brand name, mega successful and wealthy, with a major ownership stake in his studio) and Tippi Hedren was the least powerful (a model picked by Hitchcock as his muse, famous for being in his movies). It's the power disparity that makes their meeting so nail-biting, with nasty old Hitchcock creating serious predatory vibes from the off by immediately relating an inappropriate anecdote about how Grace Kelly would lick her lips to suggest "cum."

Logan loads Hitchcock's dialogue with words that can have double meanings, so Hitchcock may be talking about a film climax, but when he says "climax," Vanderham's Hedren's ultra-expressive face quietly winces somewhere between disgust and fear, and so it goes, with double entendres lacing the power dynamic with disturbingly increasing tension.

To make matters worse, Vanderham's Hedren is playing Marnie, an abuse victim, which gives Hitchcock plausible deniability for everything he is saying. . .

Anyhow, McNeice is great at playing big powerful icons, having played Wolsey at the Globe and Churchill in a couple of plays, and his powerful poise and deadpan delivery of double entendres is surface calm, but filled with punchy predatory hints beneath the surface.

Vanderham weirdly has sort of played "Marnie" before (her character in "The Runaway" opposite Jack O'Connell basically shared Marnie's backstory, exactly), she's also played a "muse" before too (Emun Elliot was ever googly-eyed over her character in the BBC's "The Paradise lol), and she's a massively accomplished stage actor, having brilliantly held her own in the company of superstar stage duo, Andrew Scott and David Dawson in "The Dazzle," but what makes this performance remarkable is how she captures that familiar sense of a Hitchcock heroine's mounting fear and dread, as if in a Hitchcock thriller, while also playing Tippi Hedren, a model turned actress having a quotidian business dinner conversation. The destabilising sense of fiction and reality merging is brilliantly achieved in the writing and the performances of both McNeice and Vanderham.

The other two characters are much closer in status. Both Vincent Price and Michael Reeves are men. Reeves gets to tell Price what to do, but Reeves can't do without Price. Reeves is independently wealthy, Price has more credits than you could count. Further, both Reeves and Price have elements of humour and warmth to them, so compromise between the men always feels possible. Because of this, Jonathan Hyde's marvellously witty and evocative Price and Rowan Polonski's tense film artiste (he's like a tortured version of Coldplay's Chris Martin, another public schoolboy like Reeves, who Polonski very much resembles) have a dynamic that is more cerebral, conversational and funny than the more dramatic Hitchcock-Hedren faceoff.

The way I look at it is that Logan has created a sort of Freudian set-up, where the Hedren-Hitchcock scene is like the scary uncontrolled "id" of the piece, the Price-Reeves scene is like the "superego," a rational debate about art, relations and morality, which puts us, the audience, in the position of "ego," having to mediate between these two interwoven and reflecting scenes, comparing and contrasting in our own minds to decide the meaning of it all.

I give this 4 and a half stars of complex, cerebral enjoyment anchored by a neo-Hitchcockian performance to savour from Joanna Vanderham.

PS: I just remembered that McNeice's Churchill was in the same "The King's Speech" play where Jonathan Hyde taught Charles Edward's King how to speak. Here, his Vincent Price really needs to teach McNeice's Hitchcock the same thing lol.