'North by Northwest' at ACT Is a Lively and Ludicrous Take on the Hitchcock Classic

British theater artist Emma Rice, who has previously stunned Bay Area audiences with wildly creative adaptations of classic films, novels, and fables, is back at ACT with a delightful and decidedly off-kilter re-imagination of Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest.

Similar to a madcap, four-person adaptation of Hitchcock's The 39 Steps, which became the fifth-longest running play in West End history before closing in 2015 and which was produced at SF Playhouse in 2024, Emma Rice's take on North by Northwest is not so reverential as it is winking and ridiculous.

Hitchcock's marvelous filmmaking aside, it's not hard to poke fun at the often ludicrous, opaque, and far-fetched plot points of these films, not to mention the confusing parade of shady characters sometimes going by multiple names. In North by Northwest, we have a main character named Roger Thornhill (played by the dashing Danny Collins), who ends up being mistaken by some bad guys for a nonexistent, decoy operative made up by the CIA (or some fictional equivalent), named George Kaplan. Thornhill as Kaplan gets taken to an estate owned by a UN diplomat named Townsend, only the man he meets there is a bad guy named Vandamm (Karl Queensborough) posing as Townsend who's trying to figure out how to get rid of Kaplan, lest he foil a ludicrously opaque international plot involving microfilm — a classic Hitchcock MacGuffin.

In Rice's telling, a character known as The Professor (Katy Owen) becomes our story's narrator, and treating the audience like children, he helps walk them through the opening scenes by having them repeat names out loud to make sure they remember them: "Roger Thornhill," "George Kaplan," etc. As The Professor, Owen gives a clownish, kinetic energy to the story, sometimes briefly morphing into another incidental character, and providing the framework for the strange ride this story takes the characters and the audience on.

The Professor's big role in the story itself comes toward the end, as he reveals himself to Thornhill — just before the iconic chase-and-dangle scene atop Mount Rushmore — to be a lead spy, and reveals that the woman who seduced him on a train, Eve (Patrycja Kujawska) isn't willfully betraying him but only pretending to, because she's a spy for the US too.

Bay Area audiences may recognize Kujawska and Owen from the previous touring casts of Rice's earlier productions, The Wild Bride, Tristan and Ysolde, and Wuthering Heights, all of which played at Berkeley Rep, and both give terrific performances here. Collins does great work carrying the show and tossing his body effortlessly around the stage through chase sequences and delirious dance sequences — did I fail to mention there are multiple dance sequences?

Rice's version of North by Northwest, with ample use of suitcases — big, bold-lettered labels upon which help tell the audience where they are, geographically, and help keep us up on plot points — is a grand dance, with the entire cast choreographed in beautiful synchronicity as they pursue, evade, shoot at, and threaten to shoot at one another. And the suitcases even become a clever stand-in for Mount Rushmore itself — though I won't give away all the delightful analog surprises in Rob Howell's set design, which is anchored by four enormous, mobile revolving doors lined with bottles of alcohol at the center.

There are also multiple, dream-like breaks in the action in which characters variously lip-synch and dance to mid-century American classics, with the notable inclusion of Nina Simone's haunting "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" — perhaps an on-the-nose selection for this story, but apt nonetheless.

Hitchcock purists are bound to bristle at the tone that's taken with the text, but have you ever thought about that text out of the context of the film itself? It's well deserving of a little parody, even though Rice ends on a more sober, trying-to-be-hopeful note about US and world politics that may or may not land, depending on each evening's audience and how much they've been happily along for the ride. (There's also, I think, a sideways reference to Hillary Clinton? Hard to say.)

No matter your knowledge, or lack thereof, when it comes to the classic film, this North by Northwest is a jolly ride that could even have Broadway transfer potential — as Rice's earlier, American film-inspired piece, Brief Encounter, had. And it's the kind of breathlessly kooky and original theater that crave, particularly in dark times.

'North by Northwest' plays at ACT's Toni Rembe Theater through October 18, Find tickets here.