North by Northwest at Alexandra Palace Theatre review: bursting with scrappy inventiveness and impish spirit

Director Emma Rice has successfully adapted The Red Shoes, Brief Encounter and the Buddha of Suburbia for the stage, among many others, but I thought Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 thriller would surely defeat her. The film is a series of widescreen set pieces – the UN building, the cropduster plane chase, the Mount Rushmore denouement – hung on the slenderest MacGuffin: slick ad-man Roger O Thornhill is mistaken for a government agent who doesn’t exist.

I’d reckoned without the scrappy inventiveness and impish spirit of Rice, working here with her company Wise Children and a host of co-producers, and occupying the atmospherically decayed theatre at Ally Pally. North by Northwest becomes an arch, handmade pastiche of the movie’s sense of dislocation and paranoia, from the moment Ewan Wardrop’s Thornhill bops onto the stage to Simon Baker’s soundtrack of noirish, dulcimer-heavy jazz, surrounded by a six-strong ensemble wearing the trenchcoat-and-trilby uniform of Cold War spies.