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Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel about a conscience-free killer and social chameleon was filmed by Anthony Minghella in 1999 and last year became an eight-part Netflix series. Mark Leipacher, adapter-director of an autumn tour advertised as “prior to the West End”, has made his version self-consciously theatrical. The staging is both impressionistic – a group of “figures” watches and surrounds Ripley, usually in the guise of citizens of European cities, but also clearly the murderer and liar’s pursuing Eumenides – and postmodern. An intermittent conceit is that Ripley is playing himself in a movie based on his life, with the figures shouting “Cut!” and demanding retakes when they sense he is improvising or lying.
My general feeling is that meta is often better, but it is unclear what this extra level of pretence adds to a story so deep with deceit and disguise. More effective are the lightning asides in which Ed McVey’s Ripley confides that the line he just spoke was a lie or delivers a subtext, such as “Boring!”, that his interlocutors don’t hear.
McVey – a very plausible Prince William in The Crown – hasn’t balked at following Alain Delon, Matt Damon, John Malkovich and Andrew Scott into the shoes Ripley steals from his first victim, and finds his own space, strongly showing the pathetic within the psychopathic.
As Ripley’s target and avatar, Dickie Greenleaf, Bruce Herbelin-Earle achieves the difficult task of embodying the trust fund dullard Highsmith wrote, while also suggesting why Ripley wants to take over his body and money. As in Shakespeare, the dead – also including Cary Crankson’s arrogant dramatist, Freddie – are not reliably off stage and Leipacher thus atmospherically makes duologues into four-handers, in some of which two actors play the same person. In a more conventional doubling, Christopher Bianchi is the dad of the missing Dickie and an Italian detective, misunderstanding the evidence twice. A shining star of the show is Zeynep Kepekli’s lighting, using neon strips of changing colours to invoke locations and moods.
The best Highsmith-Ripley theatre piece is Switzerland, Joanna Murray-Smith’s 2014 play in which the character turns up threatening to kill the novelist. Murray-Smith’s own adaptation of The Talented Mr Ripley is simultaneously running in Sydney, confirming the stage lure of the work. At one point in Leipacher’s version, Ripley, lethally tiring of Dickie’s conversation, moans that he “wants something original”, reflecting my views on another shot at this book.
