Trevor Nunn is the last generation’s Sam Mendes: equally at home with frivolous (or serious) musicals as he is with the classical repertoire. In 2004 he followed up Hamlet with Acorn Antiques: The Musical, and both were nominated for Olivier awards. He brought us Cats and Les Misérables as well as Judi Dench’s once-heard-never-forgotten scream of despair as a sleepwalking Lady Macbeth.
And now he brings to the stage, in musical form, the film regularly voted the greatest British movie of all time, The Third Man. Graham Greene and Carol Reed’s thriller about an innocent American getting caught up in a crime ring run by his erstwhile best friend in post-war Vienna doesn’t seem the most obvious candidate for musical adaptation, but then, neither did Carrie.
I was slightly trepidatious on the way in. The film of The Third Man has a unique and distinctive tone: tongue-in-cheek while still affording glimpses of the deserts of vast eternal despair that lie in the pasts and futures of its characters, their lives ripped apart by war. It’s a masterpiece of understatement, summed up by the line in its opening monologue, ‘Vienna doesn't really look any worse than a lot of other European cities. Bombed about a bit.’ Would Nunn’s version recreate that subtlety? Would it create something entirely new and different? I didn’t care, as long as it didn’t start with something as obvious as Holly Martins arriving in Austria, looking around him, and bursting into song with the words, ‘So this is Vienna…’
Oops.
To be fair, that musical cliché was leavened by a chorus of black marketeers offering Holly everything from petrol to stockings, recalling some of the hungry, staring faces that pepper the film. There was even a well-placed foreshadowing of the adulterated penicillin which becomes horrifically important later in the story. And the swift, smooth progression of scenes felt smart and fun. Staging The Third Man in three-quarter-round created the thrilling effect of the two-dimensional film bursting out of its confines into three-dimensional life, as characters occupied all corners of the stage, including occasionally hiding in the audience or behind the Chocolate Factory’s supporting columns.
It's dangerous to pass judgement on songs you’re only hearing for the first time. But I felt George Fenton’s music in this production was hit and miss. On the plus side, it has a lovely, staccato quality, gesturing towards Weill and the Berlin cabarets of the 1930s. On the other hand, when song after song does little more than tell the audience how the character is feeling, they can act as a ball-and-chain on the narrative. Almost every time Anna (played with convincing brittleness by Natalie Dunne) came onto the stage, it was a cue for a torch-song about her plight, and this undoubtedly became repetitive. Much more fun was Baron ‘von’ Kurtz’s* ditty about the disreputable past of the Cafe Mozart. And Anna, in her role as a cabaret singer (a well-judged change from simply being an actress, as she is in the film), does have one Dietrich-style show-stealer about trying to choose between two lovers, Stefan and Paul (‘just for a second opinion’).
But of course, when it comes to music and The Third Man, there is a big, zither-shaped elephant in the room. Anton Karas’s Harry Lime Theme is so famous, so synonymous with the film, so brilliantly catchy, and so evocative of Vienna, that the production has to address it in some way. It’s so irrepressible that it crept sneakily into 1950’s The Happiest Days of Your Life. Even the Beatles played it. Nunn teasingly holds it back until (spoiler alert for a story written in 1948) Harry finally makes his first appearance, and it makes for a thrilling theatrical moment. (It’s a shame that it wasn’t actually played on a zither, but that’s what happens when you’re using an instrument that virtually no one in the world is able to play.)
But the moment of the zither’s appearance also heralds the downturn of this production. Being slick and atmospheric only takes it so far. Where it falls short is in that distinctive ‘Grim Grin’ of Graham Greene. For example, in the film, one of Anna’s memorable lines is, ‘All I know is, I want to be dead too. Some more tea?’ The added query about tea is fundamental to that line, to Anna’s character, and to the work as a whole, as indeed are many such moments throughout the film and the novella. But the stage show cuts those three words. In fact it repeatedly jettisons these moments of mingled pain and comedy in favour of a flatter, more broad-stroke approach. Perhaps the most egregious example is another line of Anna’s. When she laughs at Holly for having been bitten by a parrot he asks her to laugh again, and she replies, ‘There isn’t enough for two laughs’. In the film this means that her psyche is unable to produce enough joy for such a display of happiness. In the stage show it simply meant that the incident with the parrot wasn’t funny enough to laugh at twice.
And when it comes to reimagining iconic visual sequences, I’m sorry to say that the show shies away from any opportunity for exciting, imaginative staging ideas. The Prater Wheel could have been amazing, but it was just a platform raised off the ground. The sewers were perfunctory – just a darkened stage with a bit of watery lighting. The balloon man seemed to have no purpose at all. He came on, sold his balloons, and rushed off again, rather than building suspense before the final showdown. Unforgivably, the death of Sergeant Paine (in many ways the moral heart of the entire story) was completely bungled, lost in a welter of gunshots and running bodies. And as for the final walk, one of the most brilliant and perfect shots in the history of cinema, rather than attempting an idea that might do justice, or at least pay homage to it, the production decided to avoid it almost completely, with Anna lighting a cigarette and strolling off.
When you think of Patrick Barlow’s fantastically witty and creative version of Hitchcock’s The Thirty-Nine Steps, in which four actors recreate the entire movie with the help of little more than a step-ladder, or Imitating The Dog’s barely believable version of Night of Living Dead, in which they both perform and shoot the film while the original plays on a screen above the stage, this rendition looks lame by comparison. It’s an enjoyable evening, but it is so far beneath its source material that you have to wonder, was it really worth it after all? In converting to the stage, it adds little to the greatest British film in history, but it does just about survive the transition. To quote Major Calloway, in another understated line cut from this version, ‘Terrible pity isn’t it?’
* In the film he’s just Baron Kurtz. No ‘von’.