By a strange quirk of fate, Bryony Lavery’s adaptation of Graham Greene’s 80-year-old novel opens in the same week as the revival of her own 20-year-old play, Frozen. Both works deal with murderous criminality but their outlook could hardly be more different. Where Greene believes in pure evil, Lavery suggests that violent cruelty is often the result of cerebral damage. But how, I wondered, could she possibly square her views with those of Greene?
The short answer, in this co-production between the touring Pilot Theatre and their York hosts, is that she does it by altering the whole balance of the story. The focus in Lavery’s version is on Ida: the pleasure-seeking working-class woman who believes there is something suspicious about the death of a man she briefly meets during a Whitsun weekend in Brighton. “I believe in right and wrong,” Ida tells us many times; and it is this that leads her to try to rescue Rose, a 16-year-old waitress, from the clutches of the juvenile gangster, Pinkie. Both Rose and Pinkie are, of course, Catholics, but you could say that Lavery’s interest in the story is moralistic where Greene’s is theological.
In one way, the shift of emphasis is welcome. George Orwell complained that Greene’s story was incredible since it assumes that “the most brutishly stupid person can, merely by having been brought up a Catholic, be capable of great intellectual subtlety”. Yet it is precisely that ability to invest a story of low-life thuggery with a religious dimension that makes Greene the writer he is. At one point Pinkie, thinking of Rose, reflects: “She was good, he’d discovered that, and he was damned: they were made for each other.”
While Lavery doesn’t, by any means, cut out all the Catholicism, her version, in celebrating Ida’s good-hearted tenacity, seems determined to accord with the values of a secular age. The staging by Esther Richardson is ingenious. On-stage musicians both supply an undercurrent of percussive menace and allow Gloria Onitiri, who is excellent as Ida, to croon wistfully romantic ballads composed by Hannah Peel. Sara Perks’s design is a split-level affair that evokes the iron pillars of a Brighton pier and the plush comfort of a luxury hotel. Choreographed movement is also crucial, with the youthful Rose and Pinkie being whirled round on a rotating staircase as they recreate their exploratory wedding night.
Jacob James Beswick, with his lean, hungry look and aggressively angular stance, is a very good Pinkie and Sarah Middleton reminds us that Rose’s rapt devotion conceals a fierce determination. A six-strong ensemble play endless other roles, with Jennifer Jackson turning Pinkie’s gangland rival into a trouser-suited Mrs Colleoni and with Shamira Turner appearing one minute as a louche gangster’s moll and the next as Pinkie’s seedy solicitor. But while the direction is adroit, no adaptation can ever capture the terse poetry of Greene’s prose, which typically says of a frightened hood that “a seagull flew straight towards him like a scared bird caught in a cathedral.”
The show is far superior to a bland musical version staged at the Almeida in 2004 but, in underplaying the religious theme, it still offers a paler shade of Greene.
• York Theatre Royal, to 3 March. Box office: 01904 623 568. Then on tour to 26 May.
