“Brooding production lacks urgency… but remains a fascinating study”
In the programme for The Talented Mr Ripley, it’s noted that author and Ripley creator Patricia Highsmith’s skill was ‘to make her readers’ sympathies lie with “the bad guy”.
That Tom Ripley is a baddie isn’t in doubt, he is a serial killer after all, and so we come to the first of a number of problems with this new, modern production from The Faction, Ed McVey’s anti-hero lacks the charisma to elicit that empathy – and it’s not all the actor’s fault.
In this overly long adaptation, written and directed by Mark Leipacher, McVey is scarcely off stage throughout an hour long first act and 80 minute second act. That’s a heavy learn, with much exposition to impart as the story is told on a raised, white island stage with a hole in the middle.
It sits like a giant square Polo Mint in the middle of stark, black-box staging with only rows of strip lighting and the odd piece of scenery to create a sense of place – a freezer, a window, a door, an incongruously elaborate piece of art.
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