This "High Noon" adaptation falls short of the original classic

There’s a new show in town: a classic Western – perhaps the classic Western, the Oscar-winning High Noon (1952) – adapted for stage by Hollywood screenwriter Eric Roth. It’s an intriguing idea for a night out, and the premise – a town marshal readying for a showdown with a posse of bad-guys – plainly has renewed relevance given threats to the “rules-based order” today. Alas, though: Billy Crudup and Denise Gough can’t match Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly on screen, and Thea Sharrock’s stylish and yet grit-free production stokes only fitful tension.

You can see, besides the commercial logic, why those involved identified a theatrical rationale for an adaptation. With its Aristotelian unities of action, time and place, the original screenplay by Carl Foreman has the taut quality of a Greek tragedy. This version unfolds over an interval-free 100 minutes: local officer Will Kane gets hitched and prepares to leave town. Just as he hands in his badge, he learns that Frank Miller, a wrong’un he put inside, is out of jail and heading his way on the noon train to seek revenge. Kane could get out of town, but knows that he’ll be pursued by guilt. He must risk his life to honour his idea of what’s “right”, and apparently even sacrifice his marriage – his wife Amy, a pacifist Quaker, cannot stand by her man.

All kinds of approaches could have been taken here – a modish slant, with camera-work and mics, or a folkish ensemble enactment. Sharrock and co have gone for something picturesque but pedestrian: period costumes, slatted wooden walls for the set, flurries of song and dance.

The compactness allows for fleet switches of location – a bar-room, church-hall, stables. But it doesn’t elicit the atmosphere and claustrophobia achieved on screen, where scenes outdoors often accentuated the isolation of Cooper’s restrained hero, navigating a world turned hostile, and the sense of time running out was denoted by a pulsing tom-tom. Here, an overhead clock is used to ratchet up the dread. It’s an eye-catching trick, but it also inspires clock-watching of the wrong kind.

Nor do the performances quite match up to the film. A capable and charismatic American actor, Crudup cuts a frailer, more wavering figure than Cooper – his authority is not a done-deal. That’s quite a contemporary reading of masculinity – he could be usefully more rugged.

Conversely, Gough is given more articulacy and inner conflict as Amy. The Irish actress’s presence is typically forceful, as is her singing-voice (she breathily turns Bruce Springsteen’s I’m on Fire into a soulful lament), but the warbling detracts from the governing idea that time is of the essence.

The original script is famously taciturn; here, Roth provides scope for greater garrulity all round. But it never fleshes out why the townspeople are so reluctant to help their acknowledged saviour – their lines feel more like background noise.

And the big gun-slinging denouement, albeit rushed in the film, here lacks the requisite adrenal quality – less high noon, more morning elevenses. Not a total misfire, then, but it doesn’t hit the mark – better to re-watch the film.

At the Harold Pinter Theatre until March 6. Tickets: highnoontheplay.com

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