Image: Double Indemnity photograph by Jeff Busby.
Tom Holloway’s adaptation of James M. Caine’s 1943 novella, in MTC’s production of Double Indemnity, is true to its tabloid-infused story.
Insurance claims agent, Walter Huff (Leon Ford) encounters femme fatale Phyllis Nirdlinger (Claire van der Boom) and engages in a murder plot to kill her husband for insurance – double indemnity – trading incarceration for a boat ride to Mexico. Yet its visual cues are tightly woven with Billy Wilder’s 1944 Hollywood adaptation. Esther Marie Hayes’ precise costumes create verisimilitude with the film, while Andrew Bailey’s revolving set and nebulous haze talk to its tonal qualities.
Holloway’s script is pitch-perfect. Set against backdrop of the Second World War and the great depression, the rough-hewn dialogue and post-war patois are a paean to the terse, hard-boiled language of thirties crime fiction. Sam Strong’s direction elevates the purpose of this blunt language. Walter Huff’s direct-to-audience address captures the first-person point-of-view of Caine’s novella, updating the letter-framing story within a story device and acts as a call to identify with the ‘every person’ driven to extremes. ‘I can see you out there in the shadows… Everyone loves a fantasy after all.’
But this device dissipates the urgency and crime-fiction’s negotiating morality. The original story’s conflict played out across the violent – and misogynistic – terrain of crime fiction is diluted by inefficacy. Lines like, ‘Do you know what it feels like to be bullied’ slip away and fall lightly in Claire Van Der Boom’s Phyllis Nirdlinger. Her monologue on death – ‘a scarlet shroud floating through the night, so beautiful and sad, do you ever feel like that?’ – is lost as critical elements feel more like symbols writ large.
Although Double Indemnity bears all the hallmarks of noir, twisting shadows and expressionistic lighting, scenes pull up short on the mood and tone that permeates crime fiction’s nihilism and purposelessness and the bleak mistrust of cold war period.The production refracts the novella’s mood and subversiveness through the myopia of crowd-pleasing.
Rating: 2.5 stars out of 5
Double Indemnity
Melbourne Theatre Company
Adapted by Tom Holloway from the book by James M Cain
Director: Sam Strong
Set Designer: Andrew Bailey
Costume Design: Esther Marie Hayes
Lighting Design: Paul Jackson
Cast: Claire van der Boom, Leon Ford, Peter Kowitz, Richard Piper, Edwina Samuels, Jessica Tovey, Lachlan Woods
Playhouse, Arts Centre Melbourne
30 May – 2 July 2016
