Daphne du Maurier’s 1971 story Don’t Look Now opens at the Venice restaurant table of a holidaying couple, John and Laura, who have brought their grief away with them. Nicolas Roeg’s film adaptation a couple of years later added a prologue in which we actually witness the recent loss of their youngest child, Christine, in a drowning accident. It is a horribly drawn-out scene, masterfully edited, and this new production directed by Douglas Rintoul opens by paying homage, while keeping the story’s original cause of death as meningitis.
With the house lights up, Christine comes out to play on a reflective stage and darkness slowly descends. Against Daniel Denton’s rippling, misty video design, her blue dress seems to foreshadow a watery death. The next time we see her, John is cradling her lifeless body.
It is a compelling opening for Nell Leyshon’s adaptation, which lets Laura voice more of her pain (Du Maurier’s story is filtered through John’s perspective). Leyshon has the couple reflecting on their return to the very hotel room of their carefree honeymoon, years earlier, painfully accentuating the strain on their relationship. She adds several realistic touches, threading their grief with guilt, and shows John (Mark Jackson), like their callous doctor, brusquely trying to get Laura (Sophie Robinson) to “move on” from what happened.
Du Maurier’s story is driven by an awful foreboding that colours each scene, not just the encounter with a pair of sisters who claim psychic visions of Christine but also the walking, waiting and confusions that occur after news arrives of an emergency back in England. On stage, those episodes crucially lack the creeping sense of dread: they are persistently lukewarm instead of chilling and the supernatural elements never unsettle. Although it is wisely played straight through without an interval, the closing section in particular slackens. Jess Curtis’s set becomes an empty shell on which John, the Venice police and the story’s famous hooded figure run around, with faintly ridiculous results.
Until that climax, Curtis’s set had efficiently switched from hotel room to restaurant, while opened doors revealed the depth of the stage, and evoked places of worship and the ghostly streets of a city described as “slowly dying” in the story. Curtis’s costumes come mostly in the colours of the canals and, as in Du Maurier’s original, the often empty surroundings – mournfully lit by Jessie Addinall – underscore the absence the couple suffer.
Like Adrienne Quartly’s score, the script is far better at conveying sadness than suspense. Leyshon describes water that looks like oil and boats that resemble coffins but John is given a number of overwrought psychic episodes, which scupper the mysteriousness of Laura’s later surprise appearance alongside the sisters (Olivia Carruthers and Alex Bulmer). Although it is moving to see John and Laura strive to rediscover their intimacy, some of the performances can sound stilted and the characters never get under your skin. Any suspense is sadly submerged.
