Theatre Review: His films were horrific.. and so was his acting

Double Feature
Hampstead Theatre, London, until March 16

Vincent Price was a huge personality, but not perhaps such a huge acting talent. Casting directors often can’t get their heads around that, with Jim Broadbent portraying the much-loved horror film star in the 2005 National Theatre production of Theatre of Blood and now Jonathan Hyde in John Logan’s Double Feature.

The play is partly focused on the making of the 1968 cult classic Witchfinder General and the fraught relationship between Price – then in his late fifties – and the film’s 24-year-old director Michael Reeves, who wanted him to act effectively rather than just ham it up as usual.

Hyde looks very much like Price – the costume supervisor Deborah Andrews has clearly also matched the clothes the actor wore during that period exactly – but he can’t quite communicate his huge personality. Rowan Polonski is more interesting as the doomed but brilliant Reeves, but, just when it looks like the two are going to establish some sort of chemistry, they get interrupted by Ian McNeice and Johanna Vanderham, playing respectively Alfred Hitchcock and Tippi Hedren.

Logan’s idea is to contrast the equally difficult relationship that those two had making the film Marnie, but that story never quite takes off. It’s well-trodden territory in any case as Terry Johnson’s Hitchcock Blonde has already explored the director’s dark subconscious. At one absurd point, Logan has all four characters seated at the same table having dinner, forever interrupting, but never acknowledging each other.

It’s an opportunity missed because there is certainly a great play to be had out of the Price-Reeves relationship, and, as a matter of fact, it’s already been written by Matthew Broughton in the superb Radio 4 drama Vincent Price and the Horror of the English Blood Beast that was first broadcast in 2010. That play featured, for once, a perfect Price in Nickolas Grace.

Still, the director Jonathan Kent tries to make what he can out of Double Feature, the lighting by Hugh Vanstone is terrific, and I was impressed, too, by Anthony Ward’s set, even if I have no idea why, at one point, it is laboriously shifted sideways to reveal a bedroom in which no one ever ventures. Maybe for Ward it was a symbol of a production that, for all the effort, had little if any point.

I left thinking how much more sensible it would have been to have revived Hitchcock Blonde and adapted Broughton’s funny and accomplished drama for the stage rather than have to endure this pale and ultimately rather boring fusion of the two.