Although OTC’s new Vertigo may initially look like an adaptation of the celebrated Hitchcock movie, it actually takes us back to the source, the Parisian pot-boiler, D’entre les Morts by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac.
Its bare, institutional setting in the Pitie-Salpetriere Hospital could not be further removed from Hitchcock’s lavish cinematography, though it is none the worse for that. This is a production that makes great use of its spare staging, particularly in the familiar sequence in which the protagonists climb the church tower steps: audiences will certainly feel sympathetic pangs of vertigo as the actors run in and out of windows and teeter on the ledges.
The two leads, Roger (Steve Dineen) and Madeleine (Sophia Thierens) are beguiling. Dineen cultivates a palpable distance from the other characters, setting much of his speech within ironic quotation marks. This makes his emotional troubles all the more violent when they come, as they are the outbursts of a deceptively sane man. Thierens is even finer as Madeleine. She has the glassy allure of a Hollywood starlet, and takes the same less-is-more approach to her performance, to striking effect. The same cannot be said of Peter Gardiner and Daniel Copeland as the psychoanalyst and his actor accomplice. The play is, understandably, a stagier affair in their hands, which occasionally strikes a jarring note.
This Vertigo, then, tries to combine film and fiction. Though there is the odd visible join between the two, it is nevertheless a clever and compelling piece of theatre.
Production information can change over the run of the show.
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