However, Rattenbury's adaptation includes some narrative jolts, Django Bates's jazz score is slightly intrusive, and staging car crashes is faintly ridiculous.In Liverpool this week, the Everyman is celebrating its 40th birthday in the company of its sister theatre, the Playhouse, both of which have been enjoying a new lease of life under artistic director Gemma Bodinetz. In many ways, this is a more feminist vision of Cora than Turner's, for Emmerson makes her desperately miserable, and Joseph Alessi plays her spouse as a bullying patriarch with a jovial front. Everything is brown and grey, except for the golden, flashing diner sign on the roof.Charlotte Emmerson's appearance is also refreshingly different: scruffy yet subtly attractive. Then he sees the diner: a long, low hut, furnished with spartan tables and broken blinds It's as if we are seeing through depressed eyes.
The harsh struggles of the Depression are rammed home as Patrick O'Kane's scavenging Frank is hurled off a farm truck. Those stuck on the classic movie (especially if they haven't seen the 1981 remake), may be startled by Lucy Bailey's staging because Andrew Rattenbury's new version goes back to the book for expunged scenes of brutality - including a rape.Visually, the set retains a "wide-screen" aspect but is stunning in a quite different way. James M Cain's crime novel was turned into a celebrated film noir in 1946, with Lana Turner's Cora as an iconic blonde femme fatale, enthralling the rover, Frank, as soon as he rolls up at her husband's highway diner. Intellectually, in fact, this play proves to be lamentably vague and dumbed down. Whatever happened to the evolution of ideas?Unnervingly, there's going to be another dead man on the road to Malibu in The Postman Always Rings Twice, but literary adaptations don't always follow a straight evolutionary path. Whittell's play wouldn't last if it came down to the survival of the fittest, with its slow start and lapse into pseudo-poetic, neo-Romantic tosh.
His star trio are all charmingly funny, even if Henshall needs to tone down the hollering, and the playwright's forte is being warmly entertaining. My complaint is that Terry Johnson's comparable comedies about Einstein and Freud are far more tightly structured. Each character has lost a loved one and struggled, with of without the concept of an afterlife.Director Robert Delamere's production does the piece proud. In a more serious moment, he suggests he may have pursued his theories because his daughter's death terminated his trust in God.