Sometimes I feel like walking around London’s theatreland in a cowled monk’s habit, ringing a bell and waving a sign that says: “Not Everything Has to be Turned Into a Musical.”
A case in point is this lacklustre adaptation of Graham Greene and Carol Reed’s 1949 film noir about betrayal in shattered postwar Vienna, which starred Orson Welles as the elusive, immoral Harry Lime, pursued by an insistent zither soundtrack.
Pretty much everything that makes the movie great – the wearily cynical performances, the stark-shadowed set pieces in the sewer and on the Ferris wheel, the slow unravelling of illusions – is diminished by the transition to the stage and the addition of songs.
There seems to be no shape to George Fenton’s score, which mostly consists of fragmentary themes that never develop. The exceptions are the strong numbers, mostly romantic and mournful but one of them lewdly comic, in the style of Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret, that are allocated to Natalie Dunne as Lime’s lover Anna: the character has been expediently changed from an actress to a club singer.
The book and lyrics are by Christopher Hampton and Don Black, so they are responsible for the laborious turn the dialogue takes here and the “Lime-Crime-Slime” rhymes. On the plus side it’s beautifully designed by Paul Farnsworth, in monochrome but with splashes of colour in the nightclub scenes. And it’s handsomely mounted by director Trevor Nunn, who works some familiar magic and reworks some old tricks. But the whole thing feels under-prepared, over-emphatic and frankly misconceived.
The plot is, mostly, familiar. Writer of pulp westerns Holly Martins has been summoned to Vienna by his old friend Harry but is told on arrival that Harry has died in a road accident. In the film Holly is portrayed as wry and world-weary by Joseph Cotten. Here, Sam Underwood makes him a sobbing, cringing hot mess.
Comedy Austrians Winkel and Kurz ward him off with silly accents (“I voss not ZERE”) and stiff gesticulations. Sinister Romanian Popescu darkly threatens him. Brisk British military policemen Calloway and Paine patronise him. Anna is aghast when he falls for her: frankly, anyone would be. But Holly blunders sweatily on, bashing into the set and careering through one quadrant of the audience, a clumsy expression of the way Vienna was divided among the four allied powers.
The subtle exploration in the original of the moral accommodations made by Harry, Holly and Anna here become starkly black and white. Dunne sings beautifully but her Anna is barely given a character. Simon Bailey unwisely riffs on Welles’s velvety delivery and the pouts and smirks that flitted across his face, when – spoiler alert! – Harry appears. At this point the hitherto ignored zither tune is hammered out on a piano.
Some of the choric movement in Nunn’s staging recalls his more successful 2018 production of Fiddler on the Roof. But this show has much more pointless running around and shouting in the half-dark. The songs are inserted into the story rather than growing organically out of it. You can’t blame anyone for trying. The creative team here have a record, together and separately, of turning unlikely subjects into musical gold. Not this time, though.
