It’s one of the most celebrated opening lines in all literature, incantatory and strange: “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 novel Rebecca – most famously adapted by Alfred Hitchcock into a luscious romantic melodrama – folds its key themes into that first sentence: the occluded night, where dreams and reality blur; the maddening loop of time and memory; the house as refuge and prison, pulling its inhabitants back into the murky waters of the past.
In adapting the novel for the stage, director Anne-Louise Sarks is faced with a difficult task. While the book completely submerges the reader in the morbid intensity of its unnamed protagonist’s febrile thought processes, the film has the closeup as its primary weapon, all that horror flitting across Joan Fontaine’s alabaster face. On stage, these elements are harder to conjure; there’s a pull toward naturalism, something more grounded and constrained.
