THE LADY VANISHES

By Kelly Jackson | @kellyjackson88 | Press Invite

As a bit of a film geek, I always think that there are a number of Hitchcock fans in the world that simply do not realise they are Hitchcock fans. Many people are fans of recent films that have been influenced by classics like “Psycho” or “The Birds”. So I was pretty surprised myself when I was invited to go and see “The Lady Vanishes”.

As someone who knows a bit about film I only learned that this play was based on a Hitchcock film shortly before the event. So many questions were going through my mind. Will they keep to his original story? Can they build suspense the same way in the theatre? Will there be twists and turns in the story?

The Richmond Theatre is your standard proscenium arch stage and I was given fantastic seats. I’d checked out the website pretty quickly and learned that Maxwell Caulfield and Abi from Eastenders were both in this. Even if you don’t watch Eastenders, that’s a pretty big deal for a Monday night.

The story of The Lady Vanishes centres around a young lady named Iris (Lorna Fitzgerald) who is travelling by train back to England from continental Europe. While she is boarding the train she meets a kindly old lady named Mrs Froy. After sharing the majority of the day with her, Mrs Froy suddenly disappears.

What makes the situation even stranger is that all of the other passengers are denying ever seeing the lady in the first place. You wouldn’t expect anything BUT a suspense-filled story from Hitchock, but this hits all of the right notes so well you find yourself as an audience member desperate to find out what has happened to Mrs Froy.

One of the real surprises about The Lady Vanishes is how fantastically talented Lorna Fitzgerald is as an actress. I’m sure she is grateful to her time in the soap for giving her a platform, but it can’t be easy being that young and being forever labelled as “Abi from Eastenders”. I don’t even watch it but I know her role there was limited to being the moody, sometimes spoiled younger child always living in the shadow of her sister.

Fitzgerald played Iris with real skill, and she managed to nail Iris’s escalating sense of hysteria and urgency so well without playing her character too over the top. I’ll be really interested to see what she does next after this, as this play is sure to bring her to the attention of all the right people.

If you like a mystery/thriller play (like Woman in Black), then I would definitely recommend going to see this.