On a frozen afternoon, I would normally want to consume a story like this in the form of a long cancelled tv show till I was sick on it — unfortunately, The Lady Vanishes gave me no such morbid satisfaction.
The long decorative curtains in The Genesian Theatre are this lush deep teal, giving the room a strange, 1920s mermaid cabaret feeling. Even the ornate vents are flat silhouettes of a sea floor. There’s an alien kind of comfort in passing from the crisp, white, and treeless Kent street into this echoing cradle — it’s a room that would make sense dank and dripping in condensation, with a light polluted stuffiness ideal for a naturally evolving on-stage Birth of Venus. The play I’m here to see, however, is a very above-ground mystery.
Ditzy socialite Iris Carr faints on the platform and boards her train in a daze. She shares a carriage with two shameless newlyweds, a haughty baroness, her louche doctor, and a chatty older woman named Miss Froy. Miss Froy and Iris strike up a friendship over tea before Iris has a nap to pass the time. On waking, the eponymous lady has eponymously vanished, and the other passengers insist there never was a Miss Froy to begin with. When Iris’s sanity is questioned, she seeks the help of a professor and his assistant.
The Lady Vanishes is based on the 1936 novel The Wheel Spins by Ethel Lina White, also adapted into a film by Alfred Hitchcock. The Genesian Theatre uses the 2019 script by British playwright Derek Webb. The plot is anticlimactically declawed by Webb, to family friendly ends. The actors put up a good fight throughout to bring gravitas to a script that is without bite or commitment to the misdirection that generally replaces bite in a quaint caper like this. Nonetheless, the narrative is much better suited to a visual medium. Because we cannot flip back and cross check written evidence of what Iris has seen, we experience the possible apparition that was the lady momentarily, and later, we, like Iris, can only rely on a memory of Miss Froy for confirmation of our sanity. A familiar British-ness at least translates well to the stage: all the manners and restrained moments of comradery that fans of this hokey genre relish are choreographed with utmost detail.
Regrettably, although this did successfully evoke a stilted emotional distance common to the genre, I found these choreographed mannerisms also standing in the way of any conversational chemistry on stage — this appears to me an issue with direction. Although I particularly enjoyed the menacing performance given by Gabriel Jab’bar as the doctor, no actor seemed to be physically or vocally responding to any other actor, with breaks in between dialogue leaving little room to imply a reciprocal conversation. As the characters and relationships are so typical of the genre, the effect is that of series of well rehearsed audition monologues. Also to note: every second character will gesture emphatically toward the sky to show their self importance. Intentionally hammy or not, this communally repeated motion becomes less useful for characterisation the more it reappears. The physicality of being on a train, in my opinion, also falls short — actors are swaying in opposite directions, the slim corridor in front of the carriages is adhered to by one actor at a time, and often one among many will react as if the train has abruptly halted. A whodunnit which makes little attempt to conceal whodunnit has incentive to be especially devoted to character and comedy, but The Lady Vanishes skates by on scattered laughter at the implication of jokes, not at their successful ends.
The carriages in question are each beautifully artificial, like a toy train set wishing to be real. The sliding wooden border between the carriage and the corridor parts seamlessly, and a secondary curtain peels open to reveal smaller vignettes within the story. Complicated transitions between carriages are smoothed by cleverly inserted snippets of conversation in the corridor: newlyweds bickering, elderly sisters gossiping, the doctor and baroness scheming. Save for the occasional and charming shimmying of a train station sign out of sight, movements of the crew are invisible.
Disappointingly, these in-between-scenes scenes are neither related to the mystery or, in my opinion, all that funny. All significant hints to Miss Froy’s disappearance are spoon fed to the audience in meandering exposition early on in the play. If Webb’s script had been rearranged to pepper these details over the course of the aforementioned corridor scenes, Miss Froy’s introduction would have had time to endear us to her. Instead, she speaks herself into a prop. This adjustment might also have given purpose to the corridor scenes beyond the needs of the crew.
The Lady Vanishes has a clearly passionate and skilled set design team and many well tailored pants. Unfortunately, to me, uninspired direction forces the characters of this story into a universe where everyone is equally arrogant. As a result, the jokes are surreally ineffective, with the written element drawing attention to one character’s self importance in opposition to another and the physicality undermining that. This hivemind of gesture combined with a script prone to wandering off into well-trodden narrative deadends left me curious about better modern entries in a shrinking genre.
