High noon for high drama
A flesh wound for the Western shoot-out
Reviewed by Austin Williams
High Noon is one of the all-time classic movies. It is certainly one of my all-time favourites. Directed by Fred Zinnemann and produced by Stanley Kramer from a screenplay by Carl Foreman, the 1952 film stars Gary Cooper, then aged 51, playing the proud and principled hero, Will Kane alongside Grace Kelly as his new bride, Amy Fowler. Kelly was 21 at the time, and the sexual tension between this stubborn, older man and the innocent, fragile wife is perfectly managed. Some groundbreaking cinematography captures the gut-wrenching tension as the clock ticks down the events in the New Mexican town of Hadleyville.
The movie close-ups on Cooper’s chiselled face reveal little and everything. Is his impassive expression one of resignation, of hidden fear, or is his sweat merely a result of the sweltering mid-day sun? Is he cavalier, careless, brave in the face of danger? It is a masterclass of understatement all told in real time as we wait and wait and wait for the threat to unfold. The anxiety, the moral dilemmas, the tension, the strain, the betrayal, the isolation: so much emotional torment conveyed on the big screen version… and all completely absent from the theatrical adaptation currently playing at the Harold Pinter Theatre in London.
The theatrical version of High Noon has tremendous promise. It is written by American screenwriter, Eric Roth which seemed like a shoo-in for success as he has been nominated six times for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. Without doubt, this year’s nomination will not be in the post.
His is a strange production that doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be. At times, it threatens to be a musical (with snatches of badly sung one-liners from Bruce Sprinsteen’ “I’m on Fire” and Dylan’s “Across the Borderline”), a bizarre sequence of (what I can only assume was) interpretive dance, and a background soundtrack of horses chewing. If this was amateur dramatics where the audience is allowed to be more sympathetic to budget constraints and more generous in the need to suspend disbelief, then it’s understandable. But this was the West End. A straight play falling back on experimental theatrical techniques… but for what reason?
We watched the marshal saddle a piece of wood while we were told that it was a horse. Of course, they couldn’t have a horse on stage, but could they not have reconfigured the scene? The early argument between Kane and his new bride as they rode out of town, featured the two of them sitting on a table with a wagon wheel hastily attached. These tricks require nuance, buy-in and theatrical consistency – the opposite of the off-camera manipulation available via cinematic splicing and editing. But here it required more than suspended disbelief. This kind of theatrical trickery requires engagement, conviction and a willingness to trust in what was happening. It has to immerse you in the story. But I was not convinced. I wanted to love it, but it was too remote. When you have to concentrate rather than allowing yourself to be carried away by the magic of theatre, then it is hard to come back from it.
Marshall Kane is played Billy Crudup, no acting slouch he, as winner of Tony and Emmy Awards for Best Actor in the early 2000s. Maybe because of the impossibility of movie screen-type close-ups, Crudup has to convey his insouciance, alienation and his character’s moral uncertainty in fractured sentences that ended up sounding as if he’d forgotten his lines. In the wedding dance routine at the start of the show, I desperately wanted to believe that his inability to dance was really a characterisation of the marshal’s indifference to frivolity; after all, here is a man whose life is his job and who returns to face danger precisely because he represents honour and the need to fulfil his duty. It is all that he knows. His is not a world of dance but killing. On the other hand, I have a sneaky feeling that the poor dancing was simply the fact that he couldn’t remember the steps.
Amy is played by Denise Gough, an Irish actress who has had a glittering TV career winning the Evening Standard Award and Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actress in 2016 and 2018 respectively. As she is occasionally wont to break into song in this production – or rather to sing one or two random lines of a song, prompted by a scene change, or presumably to hint at moments of inner contemplation – it is a shame that she is no singer.
Amy Fowler’s romantic innocence, her committed character, her pacifism, her disdain for broken promises, sets her up as the pure force that – spoiler alert – makes the denouement even more shocking and beautiful. Gough doesn’t have the presence. The audience needs to be invested in the characters, in the looming menace, the personal tragedies, the peril, but the production couldn’t break the distance between viewer and performer. We were watching people act out a movie.
The one scene that captured “what might have been” was the arrival of Frank Miller, the gunslinger looking to kill Marshall Kane. The theatrical invocation of a high noon train verged on the comic, but the dry ice smoke dramatically filled the audience and with ten minutes to go, it looked promising. As the clouds parted, Miller (played by James Doherty, multi-tasking in a number of roles) had a strange otherness to his appearance, like a 2-d celluloid projection, as he faded into view. We needed more of this. Similarly, Rosa Salazar in the role of the hardened seductress (played by Katy Jurado in the movie) was very effective, as were a few roles taken by other members of the ensemble. Salazar played with conviction, desperation and resignation consistent with her cinematic counterpart and a reflection of the character’s downtrodden social status.
Those who haven’t seen the movie may not react as badly as I have to the wooden staging, odd production, experimental tics and amateur dramatics. Indeed, many stood to applaud the actors as they took their curtain call. But many were muttering their disappointment as they left the theatre. For me, I rushed home to put the kettle on and contain my disappointment with a late-night DVD of the original, masterful Cooper/Kelly version.
HIGH NOON at the Harold Pinter Theatre, Panton Street, London
Director: Thea Sharrock; Writter: Eric Roth. Starring Billy Crudup & Denise Gough,
