The Talented Mr Ripley

Adapted by Phyllis Nagy
from the novel by Patricia Highsmith.
Directed by Ian Hastings.
29 October 2004, The Dukes, Lancaster

Reviewed by satori

I misspent my youth. Thanks to a very fair rate of exchange and certain aptitude on my part, I was able to continue misspending it for some 20-odd years. I'm paying now. My lungs are rubbish, and whenever I breath any smoke my tonsils come up like balloon and I'm laid up with bronchitis. So finding myself trapped in the centre of the theatre as a faint mist of dry ice brought up the lighting and made the set look a bit - dramatic - gave me a bad moment (I hate dry ice and it hates me). The early drama of the play gave me the incentive to stick it out though, trying to breathe through my ears and making for the heights at the rear of the theatre where the air was more alpine at the earliest opportunity.

So other people may not find some of the later opening sequences as slow as I did. When you're being slowly gassed you want the moments to count, I suppose. The scene with Aunt Dot seemed endless. 'You've dusted that chair six times now', I thought, 'and it didn't need doing in the first place'. Ah well, that's where the acting comes in. It seemed as if a lot of 'establishing' was taking place, putting in the foundations of the plot, Tom's background, his circumstances, his scams, without too much feel, until we could get into the story. Some redundant characterisation - Dickie Greenleaf's parents as fake as the dust on the chairs (These are the rich republican piggies we're all entitled to despise, so let's see quality ham). Fausto the beach 'boy' reminiscent of Manuel from Fawlty Towers.

If you've seen the film with Jude Law, forget it, this isn't anything like it. The back projections are clever and compellingly engage the attention in a way the actors don't all immediately do. They add another layer of reality over the first, like looking through a window into a room and then realising that what you see is your own reflection. In this case it is the inner world of Ripley that is reflected, that looks on as he gradually piles on layer after layer of identity, laying flesh onto the bones of the story and bringing it to an appalling and thrilling life.

In the story Tom Ripley is a hustler - a wooden boy straining for reality but tripped up by petty constraints - the wrong school, the wrong parents - the wrong income. The wealthy Greanleafs want to draw their errant son Richard back from Europe to the family fold. Constantly reinventing himself, Tom Ripley passes himself off to them as an old schoolfriend of Richard's - so successfully that they pay him to go to Italy to recover their son.

The relationship that Tom develops with Richard Greenleaf is strange - one can't really understand why Dickie takes to him, he is such a cold fish - Highsmith may have intended him to apear charming, but Nagy wrote him no charming lines - we are left to assume he must have been more attractive on some other day...... However when one sees Dickie's girlfriend Marge coiffed in her turban exactly like his mother, wheedling on in her high-pitched voice, one senses that Tom represents the freedom Dickie yearns for - symbolised by the remembered guilty violence of their first meeting - and just as fake.

These straight women in their turbans - Mrs Greenleaf and Marge. From where Tom stands they are terrible in their fecund tyranny. Marge comfortable and smiling in her arrogantly naive vulnerability. Tom has only the devastating power of his emptiness to counter it. Richard is drawn in, but for all his rebelliousness can never willingly leave the shallow end of the pool and ultimately will always go back to Marge - unless Tom can reinvent him too.

Highsmith (the storywriter) was a lesbian, I'm informed, and homoeroticism pervades the piece. But Tom's jealous desire for Richard goes far deeper than sex - he wants his approval, his unshared companionship, his clothes, his past, his identity. The intensity between them ignites as they encounter a streetwalker, Sophia who, unturbanned, would appear to represent everything that Richard has truly been seeking - and Tom, sensing the danger - and the opportunity to tempt Richard out of his depth - tries to persuade Richard to rape her..

As the plot twists so does Tom's mind. I found the interplay between the action on the stage and back projection fascinating. It becomes impossible to tell what is 'real' and what is Tom's delusion - and utterly absorbing.

Toby Hadoke as Freddie Miles brings a natural strength to the stage - and a natural stagecraft that gives an underpinning realism to the production at this critical turning point.

Elizabeth Jasicki lacks conviction as Marge in badly-fitting clothes and a woefully bovine part (isn't this a girl who has travelled halfway across the world and is living artistically in sin?) but she came through as Sophia.

Leigh Kelly was perfect as a stressed-out con victim but struggled with his accent and a miscast role as Fausto / Silvio. A beach / bathboy he is not. Take it from someone who has misspent her youth assiduously. Tom's first encounter in Mongiobello, he should be a symbol of youthful homo-eroticism - warmth, confidence, skin, light-footedness, sensuousness and irresponsibility, creating the link between the two main protagonists. A look at the photo collection of Baron Von Gloeden should convey the idea.

However there was one touching moment as he placed the ring on Ripley's hand that he handled with poignant tenderness. His offer of love goes unheeded by Ripley, underscoring Ripley's neurotic need, not for love or sex, but to endlessly shop upwards for a whole identity.

Piers Ronan is excellent as Richard Greenleaf and the two leads play off each other with a vital chemistry that ignites the whole production.

Peter Prentice as Ripley is never off the the stage and builds his character from a sharply focussed, almost 2 dimensional hustler to a grippingly intense and complex obsessive inhabited and surrounded by his personal ghosts. His Ripley is a wonderfully tortured monster - something really to be proud of. Underscoring this creation are the set design, projections and lighting brought together by Terry Brown, Brent Lees and Alan Fitzgerald, which gave the the whole production its superbly intriguing psychotic depth.

I really got into this play, it was deeply engaging. All the way home I kept realising more things about what I'd seen, making new connections. It lives. So go, Enjoy this original and fascinating journey.