3 STARS, November 28 – December 2. Some great performances and a lovely set can’t fully redeem a thin and silly script, says Alice Cairns
We’ve all seen the kind of horror films where monsters prey on innocent victims in the middle of the night. We’re used to heaving a sigh of relief when the light comes up, purging the world of shadows. To us, light means safety and sanity, darkness means danger and derangement.
But Wait Until Dark turns this expectation on its head, giving us a plucky heroine who’s in her element when the lights are low. In fact, one of the biggest scares in the piece comes when a beam of light unexpectedly bathes the stage. It’s a clever trick that invites us to reassess one of the tired clichés of the thriller genre.
Wait Until Dark is most famous as a 1967 film starring Audrey Hepburn - but it was originally written for the stage. Our heroine is Susy, a blind woman who refuses to be a victim. She’s intelligent, plucky, and uses her cat-like hearing to keep track of her surroundings. She has a devoted husband, and a love-hate relationship with Gloria, the sulky little girl in the apartment next door.
When Susy’s husband unwittingly carries a musical doll full of heroin into their flat, she falls prey to three conmen determined to get it back. They take advantage of her blindness, creeping through her house and feeding her lies. They’d do anything to unlock a mysterious safe that sits shrouded in a blanket in the corner of Susy’s living room. As Susy begins to sense that all is not right, she’s pitted against the deranged and bloodthirsty Roat.
Rather surprisingly, Karina Jones is the first blind woman to act the central role in the play’s 50-year history. She does an excellent job, by turns funny, affectionate and grimly determined. It’s easy to root for her. Perhaps the most compelling thread of the story is Susy’s relationship with Gloria, who is played with humour by the standout Shannon Rewcroft. At first, the pair hate each other – but as the play goes on, they gang together to defeat the conmen who are preying on Susy.
The set is wonderful, and the use of light and darkness have been carefully considered. At times – notably towards the end – the stage is plunged into total darkness. At other times, lamps create dim pools of light, or luminous fluorescent beams throb blindingly above the stage. In fact, one of the most pleasing tricks of the staging is that it blinds us by turns with light and with darkness. The scattering of furniture in the flat becomes an obstacle course for Susy, who navigates it with increasing panic as the play draws to its conclusion.
But in spite of all this, the tension sometimes falls a little flat. There’s always a fine line between fear and laughter, and sometimes this production tipped over the edge. Moments of melodrama drew giggles from the audience, and what should have been Hitchcockian often felt hammy. The script hasn’t aged well – the idea that you’d carry a stranger’s doll home from an Amsterdam airport seems ludicrous in our days of draconian airport security. It feels implausible that the conmen would go through such an elaborate charade to coax the location of the doll from Susy, rather than using physical force to get their way in a fraction of the time. And a small gripe – the doll in question (which I had imagined as enormous, sinister and brimming with heroin), was tiny. It simply didn’t seem worth all the effort.
In short then, Wait Until Dark has some wonderful performances and an intelligently designed set – but its dated script fails to deliver on plausible thrills.
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