The Ripley Interchange
The Talented Mr Ripley (Guildford and National Tour)
For those who don't know it, the Ripley Interchange is the bane of every Surrey motorist's life. It's the point at which the A3 meets the M25 and, if that wasn't scary enough, it's a stone's throw from Ockham's Black Swan, the pub used to film the interiors of The Slaughtered Lamb for An American Werewolf in London. As for the village of Ripley, it shares its name with a fictional serial killer and it seemed fitting that I should be driving right past it to see this new play based on the book which first introduced us to him.
Tom Ripley is an odd duck indeed, the sort of murderer you're secretly supposed to like, a John the Baptist figure for Hannibal Lecter. He's a psychopath, yes, but, in an era where the cluster of behaviours associated with that label can mean a contestant on The Apprentice or indeed the President of the United States, any actor playing him should bring something else again to the party, something truly unsettling (see our podcast about the Patrick Wymark film, The Psychopath Click here for The Psychopath )
I always thought that Matt Damon in the film version was a little too nice. Anthony Minghella likes bringing us nice characters (not least the nicest smackhead ever in Grange Hill's Zammo McGuire). It is here that Ed McVey absolutely steals this production. Whatever it is that he portrays, 'nice' isn't it. He's hesitant, unsure of himself, in a perpetual dialogue with the audience, but also manipulative, extremely cunning and, yes, a complete monster...but definitely one who has you rooting for him.
Meanwhile, Bruce Herbelin-Earle sizzles as oversexed hedonist Dickie Greenleaf and Maisie Smith tops Gwyneth Paltrow's suspicious, tortured Marge Sherwood in that she doesn't keep trying to sell you dubious beauty products. The three leads, then, absolutely nail it.
The sets are triumphantly minimalist and the whole thing played out as a simultaneous nightmare and movie (with continual cuts and retakes) occurring in Ripley's mind - it is a tour de force of staging.
It is strange to think, then, that McVey, who brings new life to this portrait of nascent evil, became famous in his first ever TV role, playing Prince William in Netflix's The Crown. Perhaps it should have been a different Mountbatten-Windsor? Yeah, him..