Festival promises riotously funny reworking of Hitchcock’s North by Northwest

Coming from Wise Children/Emma Rice, it will be at the Theatre Royal Brighton from Wednesday to Saturday, May 14-17, bringing together just six performers, a 50s soundtrack and a lot of suitcases.

In the piece, Roger Thornhill, reluctant hero of North by Northwest, is mistaken for someone else when a mistimed phone call to his mother lands him smack bang in the middle of a Cold War conspiracy. Now he’s on the run, dodging spies, airplanes and a femme fatale who might not be all she seems. The cast are promising “a night of glamour, romance, jeopardy and a liberal sprinkling of tender truths.”

Patrycja Kujawska returns to the company to play Eve Kendall: “It is so different to the film but in an absolutely lovely way,” she says. “But we are still very truthful to the story. It follows it exactly with maybe a little twist at the end!

“Emma and our set designer have cleverly decided that they didn't want to recreate the film because that would be impossible and quite frankly a bit boring. We could have had film projections of a massive plane hovering over the main character but that would be boring and also a bit lazy. But at the same time the limitations of the theatre are actually very helpful. We are asking the audience to work a little bit with us and to use their imagination, and we help them with that. It's not difficult and it is definitely great fun. It is so quick witted and virtuosic and sexy and funny and quite political and also quite deep. There is everything in it. There are only six of us on stage but we play 40-something characters. It's very demanding but that's how we want it to be. We wouldn't want to be sitting in the wings waiting for an entrance or just sitting in a dressing room waiting to be called on the tanoy.

“But it is not just a romp. When we started rehearsing it, we didn't know how the political situation in the world would quite strangely play into our hands. Somehow the story that we are performing seems very current and very relevant now. We're talking about the United Nations and we're talking about spies and we're talking about a world without war and whether that's possible. That's how the new United Nations was formed after the war so that the war would not happen again and yet here we are on the brink of things escalating. Without being heavy, the adaptation is talking about some important things. It's talking about loyalty and it's talking about the Cold War and it's the story of a man who's mistaken for somebody else and what then happens.”

Patrycja is playing Eve “She is described in our production as an attractive professional blonde who is going about her own business but she becomes involved in one way or another and she decides to help him, but the help is not unambiguous…

“We opened the show in York and we have had a brilliant response. The joy coming from the audience is palpable. You can just feel it. I don't read reviews because that's not healthy but you can just feel how much the audience are enjoying it. You know the vibe and people talk to you in the bar afterwards. And they just approach you with such joy.”