As the former artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe adapts North by Northwest for the stage, she explains why she ‘can’t bear victimhood’
“With paper and a pair of scissors, an aerosol can and some suitcases,” is Emma Rice’s answer when I ask her how she plans to stage the famous biplane scene in her forthcoming adaptation of North by Northwest. Another director might have been tempted to use hi-tech wizardry, or video projection at the very least, to recreate the unforgettable moment Cary Grant’s Roger Thornhill dives into a cornfield to escape a murderous aircraft in Hitchcock’s 1959 Cold War caper. But in Rice’s show, she says, the most sophisticated gizmo is a revolving door. “We’ve only got a cast of six, and the actors not only play several characters but have to remember whether their door is spinning clockwise or anti-clockwise. So it’s fiendishly structured, just like Hitchcock.”
We are talking, before rehearsals begin, in the Lucky Chance – the former Methodist church in Frome, Somerset, which Rice’s theatre company, Wise Children, recently acquired as its permanent home. It’s draughty and a bit damp, but, in typical Emma Rice fashion, it’s warmly fitted out in a kitsch, giddy way – neon-pink paint everywhere, fairy lights, mirrors.
A director with a folk spirit, who revels in the sensual and the romantic – her hits with her former company, Kneehigh, include a screen-to-stage adaptation of Brief Encounter and the magical Marc Chagall homage The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk – Rice is not an obvious fit for the work of a cinema auteur known for ice-cold psychosexual riddles. Yet she argues that North by Northwest, in which Thornhill, on the run for a crime he didn’t commit, finds himself embroiled in a plot to smuggle state secrets out of the country, is more progressive than it might initially seem….