John Logan’s frustrating new play is a pub quiz film round mounted on stage. It awkwardly splices together Alfred Hitchcock’s attempt to control and conquer Tippi Hedren during the filming of Marnie in 1964 and Vincent Price’s fraught relationship with the young, doomed director Michael Reeves on Witchfinder General four years later.
Logan has intelligent ideas about power dynamics between artists – one of his preoccupations – as well as image vs reality, and age vs celluloid immortality. But the characters are little more than stiff, emotionally inconsistent mouthpieces for these thoughts in Jonathan Kent’s stilted production.
