Brighton Year-Round 2025
The Talented Mr. Ripley
Jack Maple, Thomas Hopkins, Sam’s Entertainment, Carl Moellenberg The Faction Production
Genre: Adaptation, American Theater, Costume, Drama, LGBT, Mainstream Theatre, New Writing, Queer Film Noir, Theatre
Venue: Theatre Royal Brighton
Festival: Brighton Year-Round
Low Down
Mark Leipacher with The Faction Production has adapted and directs his metatheatrical take on a classic: Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel The Talented Mr. Ripley plays at Theatre Royal Brighton till 1 November. Starting at Birmingham, it transfers to the West End. It’s that slick and as theatre, unmissable.
A must-see. Minor caveats aside it’s as absorbing as some productions recently have plodded. This isn’t just any Ripley….
Review
“Ever get the feeling you’re being watched?” Of course if you think you know the story, you’ll know this will be different. Again. There’s as many Ripleys out there as Tom Ripley invented himself. The 1999 film, the Netflix remake with Andrew Scott, and other dramatised versions all nuance and even end differently. Mark Leipacher with The Faction Production has adapted and directs his metatheatrical take on a classic: Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel The Talented Mr. Ripley plays at Theatre Royal Brighton till 1 November. Starting at Birmingham, it transfers to the West End. It’s that slick and as theatre, unmissable.
If you saw Emma Rice’s North by Northwest here last May you might also get a distinct Déja-vu feel: Holly Pigott’s elegant prop-fluid stage is though less frantic and simple in its brilliance. Again though there’s men in 1950s hats with synchronised newspapers (Pigott’s elegantly spare costumes), ritual ballets (Sarita Piotrowski’s movement), hosts of ensemble pursuing you like the conscience you don’t have, tamed furies from someone else’s perhaps. It has to be said that here Leipacher easily surpasses Rice in substance, and the style finds mostly a depth to strike lightning from. There’s birds, there’s passers-by. And of course there’s the dead. They come back to mockingly support or cajole, mimic and mirror the living: whom they threaten to crowd out. Zeynep Kepekli’s chameleon lighting flicks across to shift the mood and place (Manhattan, Rome Venice, Italian beaches) with telling precision: it’s one of the production’s characters. It’s an elegance extended to Max Pappenheim’s sound design: noises off and gramophones are pared back, as the actors are miced.
Feckless fraudster Tom Ripley (Ed McVey), has got himself invited by wealthy shipping magnate Herbert Greenleaf (Christopher Bianchi) to travel to Italy to pursue his errant son whom Ripley pretends he knows better than he does. Richard or Dicky is a minimally talented artist, and Greenleaf wants Dicky to come back and helm the great family business. Added to which Dicky’s mother Emily (first of Leda’s roles, the most constrained) has leukemia. As a ship architect Dicky might succeed.
When Ripley discovers Bruce Herbelin-Earle’s Dicky Greenleaf together with writer Madge (Maisie Smith) who palpably loves Dicky more than he does her, he’s disarmingly candid. It works. Originally it’s Smith’s Madge who chides Herbelin-Earle’s haughty, offhand Dicky for not being more hospitable. Soon though the latter takes far more to Ripley than she’d like.
Homoerotic overtones flicker with that subdued social danger Highsmith had already explored in her (transgressively happier) 1952 lesbian novel The Price of Salt, pseudonymously published.
Herbelin-Earle’s voice arches this side of disdain, embodying both the languor and decisiveness of a man who really has no direction. Smith’s Madge is warmer, warier and with a trick of noticing and stillness that conveys the writer (and, if not here, photographer) she is.
The production plays on Ripley’s confiding to the audience as fourth wall whilst in the middle of dialogue. He’ll utter “boring”, then when occasionally overheard, pretend he says something else. It’s the most engaging of McVey’s jumps outside the main narrative: at one point he breaks the fourth wall altogether. McVey, who played Prince William in The Crown, here stands all gawk and gangly like a stretched meerkat, waiting for the pounce. Only Ripley finds out it’s him pouncing. There’s some exquisite cringe moments, as when McVey’s Ripley clowns and lip-synchs to amuse the couple; a self-abasement he’s consummate at.
Leipacher adds another layer where Ripley might imagine he’s in a film of himself, where a director calls “cut” and Kepekli’s lighting flashes. So Ripley replays rapid different versions of what Ripley might do or not do to someone. In the original, Ripley havers on a drastic action. Such a conceit needs more than this anchor which could be realised differently. It’s witty and metatheatrical though you wonder what it’s for, except to tell you Leipacher’s metatheatrical and witty. Which we get.
Nevertheless Leipacher’s production is stylish indeed, and continually engaging. If there’s fleeting dips in energy in a performance lasting over two hours forty minutes it’s very understandable. There’s moments too when you might imagine Scott speaking McVey’s lines: that same playful interrogative note. Happily I’ve never seen another version, and can enjoy McVey’s gawky, occasionally pathetic pathic. He’s an excellent down-at-heel Ripley, who haplessly turns to his true talent, so he might become a literal culture vulture: since he feeds off the living and dead to satisfy his America grand tour of Italy, France and Greece.
Doublings are excellently chosen: so Bianchi as Greenleaf is all anxious grandeur. As Italian detective Roverini, Bianchi might yet stumble on truth, probing and dogging Ripley. Leda’s more lively avatars include Ripley’s New York mate Cleo and a variety of slinky Italian and French women; she’s on too briefly but makes an impact. Cary Crankson’s arrogant playwright Freddie Miles is quicker than Dicky but will it help him? As detective Alvin McCarron he talks out of the side of a hard-bitten mouth: a perfect movie gumshoe (voice coach Aundrea Fudge has the cast fluent in different Americana). ,Jason Eddy’s witty Italian Fausto morphs into hapless warm-hearted Irish Peter by the end; and Lachlan McCall’s perennial passer-by, Hollie Sullivan’s American and Aldous Ciokajlo-Squire flicker through the ensemble.
This is a must-see. Minor caveats aside it’s as absorbing as some productions recently have plodded. This isn’t just any Ripley….
Casting Director Marc Frankum, Moment Director Sarita Piotrowski, Wigs, Hair & Make-Up Designer Craig Forrest-Thomas, Fight & Intimacy Director Haruka Kuroda, Associate Director & Resident Director Tian Sampson-Brown, Associate Set & Costume Designer Ellen Farrell, Associate Sound Designer Anna Wood, Voice & Dialect Coach Aundrea Fudge, Production Management Toby P Darvill For Production Solution Group, General Management Thomas Hopkins Productions. Production Photographer Mark Senior.
