Suspense turns on its master

Terry Johnson's Hitchcock Blonde is a big, bold adventure of a play, which, with witty eloquence, portrays the great filmmaker as an impotent, misogynistic, broken-hearted voyeur for whom film was akin to sexual revenge.

No wonder, in Johnson's view, Hitchcock plunged his cool, blonde heroines into bloodbaths. This finely acted drama is also a comic fantasy, seductively using William Dudley's video design and holograms. But the play's surrealistic leaps of imagination sometimes left me floundering. Johnson has unwisely directed his own work.

I had to read the text afterwards to grasp Hitchcock Blonde's meaning. Another director would have cut the 160-minute playing time, pruned self-indulgent speeches and clarified the abstruse plot-lines.

There are, though, some clarities. Johnson is not only concerned with the enigmatic character of Alfred Hitchcock, delectably impersonated by near-look-alike William Hootkins, who, with his ponderous, bass, sepulchral voice, cuts a repellent, mesmerising figure.

The play starts as a cinematographic detective story, with the rediscovery of mouldering canisters of a 1919 Hitchcock film. David Haig, sporting an unsuitable military moustache and the air of a timid sexual predator, plays Alex, a fiftyish film-studies lecturer who inveigles Fiona Glascott's acerbic student Nicola to join him at his Greek island home to decipher the canisters' contents. Cue video projections of gorgeous Greece.

In a contest of sexual manners, Haig's excellent, self-deprecating Alex tricks Nicola into having sex with him. But then - as if in answer to a middle-aged man's erotic fantasy - she falls for him while he goes limp. Alex's exploitative relationship, by turns diffident and callous, schematically parallels Hitchcock's treatment of two actress blondes in 1919 and 1959.

Modern man, Johnson accuses, exploit women for their own ends or to get their end away. Such a bald accusation does not, however, convey Hitchcock Blonde's ambition or technical ingenuity.

The scene on the Greek island, where Nicola and Alex elucidate the canisters' seminal contents, begins to merge with one in Hitchcock's inner sanctum where the director takes advantage of Rosamund Pike's overrefined blonde, who is auditioning for more than nudity.

Surrealistic fantasy, when the Blonde batters and murders her faithless husband becomes her form of therapy. She, rather as Hitchcock with his depictions of women horrifically abused, appeases her anger and anguish. Fascinating, though too abstruse.