Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel about a conscience-free killer and social chameleon was filmed by Anthony Minghella in 1999 and last year became an eight-part Netflix series. Mark Leipacher, adapter-director of an autumn tour advertised as “prior to the West End”, has made his version self-consciously theatrical. The staging is both impressionistic – a group of “figures” watches and surrounds Ripley, usually in the guise of citizens of European cities, but also clearly the murderer and liar’s pursuing Eumenides – and postmodern. An intermittent conceit is that Ripley is playing himself in a movie based on his life, with the figures shouting “Cut!” and demanding retakes when they sense he is improvising or lying.
My general feeling is that meta is often better, but it is unclear what this extra level of pretence adds to a story so deep with deceit and disguise. More effective are the lightning asides in which Ed McVey’s Ripley confides that the line he just spoke was a lie or delivers a subtext, such as “Boring!”, that his interlocutors don’t hear.
