All About Eve

based on the film by Joseph L Mankiewicz

seen at the Noel Coward Theatre on 18 March 2019

Ivo van Hove continues his project of adapting classic films for the stage, with Gillian Anderson as Margo Channing and Lily James as Eve Harrington taking the roles originally played by Bette Davis and Anne Baxter. His partner and collaborator Jan Versverveld is the set and lighting designer, providing the by-now familiar versatile and at the same time slightly alienating space on stage to replace the fluidity of film sets.

Eve Harrington, an apparently naive young woman, is besotted with the stage star Margo Channing, and graduates from hanging about the stage door to being Margo's indispensable personal assistant, masking a steely ambition to replace her idol. The frisson of the piece is to watch a mature star exert her social dominance in the theatre world while belatedly becoming aware of the threat; and to realise for ourselves what lies behind Eve's surface modesty and endless willingness to please. In this production Gillian Anderson portrays both Margo's brazenness and her vulnerability with consummate skill, though Bette Davis is of course a difficult act to follow even in a different medium. Meanwhile Lily James maintains an almost perfect mask of innocence until a crucial late scene in which her daggers are drawn in a nasty piece of blackmail.

Surrounding these two is an excellent cast including Sheila Reid as Birdie, the faithful but acidic dresser Birdie who is suspicious of Eve from the start, Julian Ovenden as Bill Sampson the theatre director whose ultimate loyalty to Margo barely needs testing, Monica Dolan as Karen Richards whose misguided patronage of Eve nearly proves disastrous to her friendship with Margot, and Stanley Townsend as Addison Dewitt the worldly wise critic.

The film was based on a play; van Hove has turned the film back into a play. Without knowing the original I do not know if this is justified. Most of the action takes place on stage; the three walls of the set rise vertically at times to reveal the bare walls of the backstage and to allow furniture props to be wheeled on or off. Some scenes take place in small rooms not directly visible on stage - a bathroom and a kitchen - which are filmed and projected onto the back wall, and sometimes when Margo or Eve sit at a lighted mirror with their backs to the audience the mirror's reflection is also projected above. It's clever, but also, in pure theatrical terms, a little close to cheating. There's occasionally a subdued throb of music, another van Hove hallmark, to accompany moments of heightened crisis. This is not as obtrusive as in some of his productions, which is good as the general style of the play does not require the level of intensity that was most successful evoked in the first van Hove production that I saw, A View from the Bridge (reviewed in March 2015).

It's stylish, with a number of trademark features, and an excellent cast, but I'm not sure that it has the crackling energy required. Of course, it is not meant to be a slavish re-creation of the film, and yet at times the mechanics of managing the the piece on stage in this way get in the way of the real momentum of the story.