So where is the value-added? Sometimes it’s songs. Sometimes it’s stars in the flesh. Here it’s an attempt to get us inside the head of Highsmith’s elegantly psychopathic outsider Thomas Ripley. Headspace, after all, the theatre can do: sumptuous vistas of postwar New York or the Amalfi coast are another matter.
On screen we got to know Matt Damon, Andrew Scott, Alain Delon or John Malkovich’s talented Ripleys through the fronts they put on. In many of the best moments here, Ed McVey (Prince William in The Crown) offers frenzied inner monologues even as Ripley befriends, murders and assumes the identity of Dickie Greenleaf, his more gilded contemporary. McVey masks his good looks with glasses and an adenoidally neurotic vocal timbre that can spend too long in the Jerry Lewis/Professor Frink from The Simpsons zone. He isn’t charming but he is a trier. The tenacious Mr Ripley.
Which makes him, give or take the odd brutal clubbing of a foe, a stand-in for all our social anxieties. McVey energetically interweaves Ripley’s anxious appraisals of what’s going on and his tussles with Dickie’s concerned father (Christopher Bianchi), Dickie’s suspicious lover (Maisie Smith) and Dickie (Bruce Herbelin-Earle), whose couldn’t-care cool exerts a gravitational pull.
This Ripley isn’t cool. But McVey carries us along with the sheer scale of his character’s need. He needs more variation, more moments where he sells us Ripley the great dissembler as well as Ripley the lucky sod, but it’s a performance of enormous promise all the same.
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Does the adaptation — first seen on the Fringe in 2015 — obliterate memories of its predecessors? It did for me for a while, but Leipacher and the designer Holly Pigott clear a space for themselves, then get in their own way. The playing area is black, largely bare, with a central raised rectangle where the key action takes place. It’s an obtrusive unit that never entirely fades into abstraction. Add the way the cast acts like a Greek chorus, or the jarring interludes where bright lights come on and we are told that this is a film set, and the stylish edges into the muddled. “It’s all a bit ‘theatre’, isn’t it?” a man behind me muttered.
Leipacher fillets Highsmith’s first-person text well, but the longer second half (a crime against audiences) doesn’t so much embed us in Ripley’s shenanigans as bedevil us with the details. There’s little tension as our antihero’s story fractures and regroups. So even with the dead Dickie joining Ripley on stage, even as the mental overlaps with the physical in an only-in-theatre kind of way, it ends up as one damn thing after another.
★★★☆☆
Richmond Theatre, London, thetalentedmrripleyplay.com
