Perhaps it was the corner-shop setting that first drew Alfred Hitchcock’s attention to Charles Bennett’s Blackmail as the source of his 1929 film. Hitchcock had grown up above his family’s small shop in east London. He would have recognised the world of Bennett’s play, in which claustrophobic living “back stage” is combined with a whirl of local gossip “front of house” on the shop floor.
Or perhaps Hitchcock was simply drawn by the huge success of the play. It had opened in the West End in 1928 with Tallulah Bankhead incongruously cast as a young, working-class Londoner. The response in London had been mixed. But once the play went on tour it was a sensation. Its frank portrayal of female sexuality, more than a dash of male homosexuality and a questioning of the probity of the justice system drew audiences across the country. By the end of the year, multiple companies were touring the play.
Its first act is a sensational melodrama. But in the second and third, it shifts into a different genre: the thriller. Driven by suspense rather than shock, those final two acts invent the ground rules for much of the work that Bennett and Hitchcock were to make for the rest of their lives.
The duo first planned Blackmail as a silent film. But sound equipment arrived at the studio during filming in 1929. Hitchcock – always fascinated by new technology – reshot some scenes to produce the UK’s first full-length “talkie” which became an even bigger hit than the original play.
Hitchcock and Bennett carried on working together on the British films The Man Who Knew Too Much and The Thirty-Nine Steps, creating the template for the “wrongly accused man on the run” story. Hitchcock returned to that template at the height of his Hollywood success with North by Northwest, which reutilises the device of a climactic chase at a national monument he first invented with Bennett for Blackmail.
When the producer Simon Friend invited me to revisit and revise Bennett’s play for a new production, I decided to cut the first melodramatic act. Bennett wrote a first draft of Blackmail while working as a young actor in 1924. I reasoned that if he himself had returned to the play, it’s a cut he would have considered. Confining the action to a room behind the shop – as his second and third acts do – and revealing earlier events with a series of revelations, creates the boilerhouse of secrets and lies that make an effective thriller.
One of the great challenges of the genre is to write the characters into a corner from which there seems no possible escape. The playwright then has to invent a reversal in the last few minutes which suddenly provides an opportunity for escape that neither the characters nor the audience could have anticipated. It’s a tough call. Bennett’s drafts reveal that he had several goes at an ending, none of which he found entirely satisfying. For my new version, I’ve taken one of his possible endings, developing and amplifying it to create – I hope – a satisfying but not-too-neat ending with a moral ambiguity that leaves the audience with some big questions about the events they’ve just witnessed.
Bennett was at work on an unproduced screenplay of a new version of Blackmail when he died in 1995. Working from drafts and notes provided by his estate, I’ve come up with a new version which I hope honours his status as the inventor of the modern thriller.
Blackmail is at the Mercury theatre, Colchester, 4-19 March.
