Playwright Terry Johnson, who turns 48 this year, has chosen to direct his latest play himself, so the result is clearly what he envisioned. His production of Hitchcock Blonde has turned out to be disappointing and confusing. Three time frames are involved, separated by four decades.
In 1999, Alex, a film lecturer in his late forties, takes a twentysomething student Nicola to a Greek villa, where they try to piece together disintegrating remnants of a film, "The Uninvited Guest," allegedly shot in 1919 by the 20-year-old Alfred Hitchcock. Interspersed are scenes in 1959, when the middle-aged director, who had a lifelong fondness for casting Nordic-looking blondes (Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, Kim Novak, etc.), auditions a blonde as a body double for Janet Leigh in the bloody shower scene of "Psycho." Both Alex and Hitch have other things on their mind than cinema. Alex, well played by David Haig, and Nicola (Fiona Glascott), too unmodulated in speech, indulge in a good deal of technical talk about film and a lot of other protracted banter that is just plain boring.
The best feature of the show is William Hootkins' uncannily accurate impersonation of the rotund and pompous 60-year-old Hitch, who loves nothing more than devouring Dover sole and sucking up a baked custard in one motion. Rosamund Pike merits praise as the aspiring and sometimes nude actress who tries to do away with her husband (Owen McDonnell).
Designer William Dudley had the difficult task of providing several settings, including a real swimming pool, along with projections of fragments of the 1919 film. From time to time, appropriately, we hear bits of Bernard Herrmann's screeching string music from "Psycho." An awful lot of work has gone into serving an unfocused script.
