Review: HIGH NOON starring Billy Crudup, Harold Pinter Theatre

I’ve never seen High Noon. I’ve never liked Westerns, a chance remark from my grandfather, watching Saturday morning kids television pre-Swap Shop, “The Injuns never win” made me wonder why the cowboys always did. Not much later, I understood why, then as now an instinctive follower of Gramsci, culture underpinning and driving politics. Not long after that, I learned of Manifest Destiny and its impact on Native Americans. The only cowboy I ever liked was the one singing and prancing about outside the YMCA.

But that is to generalise about westerns as one might about country music if all you saw were the confederate flags flying in the car park. John Wayne turned down the lead that immortalised Gary Cooper (always a good sign if The Duke is against something), High Noon’s screenwriter, Carl Foreman, was blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee and the movie’s producer, Stanley Kramer, was a liberal Hollywood icon. Not all Westerns are the same.

Eric Roth has a storied career as a writer of movies, 50 years in Tinseltown with credits for the likes of Forrest Gump and Killers of the Flower Moon on his CV. I’ve seen too many successful songwriters and playwrights attempt to write musicals to take it for granted that he would transfer his skills from screen to stage, but, as was the case with my distaste for the genre, I was worrying unnecessarily - Roth’s first play is beautifully judged.

Casting is key to that. Billy Crudup (mercifully nobody applauded when he made his entrance, all too often a dismal distraction when American movie stars appear in the West End), catches our hero’s flawed dignity and dangerous dilemma perfectly, a quiet man unexpectedly pitched into a life or death situation as the clock, handily visible above the stage, rolls towards midday.

Marshal Kane’s day had started differently, the lawman wedded to his sweetheart, a widow (that helped to close an age difference that would bring an ick factor that mattered much less when a 21 year-old Grace Kelly played Amy Fowler in 1952). The great and good of the New Mexico town so small that the train often skips its station, respect their noble protector, but he’s handing back his badge now, the job too dangerous for a married man.

Suddenly the unexpected release from jail and imminent return of the outlaw and killer, Frank Miller, tooled up and riding into town on the noon train, vowing revenge on the men who put him away, sees the judge saddle his horse and hightail it out of town, advising Kane to follow him. He was soon on his carriage, sitting next to his wife, but turned round, against Amy’s wishes, she being a devout Quaker sworn off guns, to face down his foe. There was nobody wearing the badge to protect him and the outlaw would hunt him down anyway.

Kane attempts to round up a posse to see off the Miller Gang, but, after five years of peace in the town, there’s no stomach for the fight. Amongst the townsfolk, Kane is less liked than he expected, his boozy but committed deputy resentful that he wasn’t a shoo-in for the vacated post of marshal, others feeling that Kane’s reticence and decency made him hard to read and untrustworthy. Others welcomed the return of Miller, a crook and a liar, but good for business and “at least you know where you stand with him”. (The grim laughs around me showed that I was not alone in suffering from ‘Trump Arrangement Syndrome’ - the propensity to see everything through the lens of the crazy king’s narcissism).

Forsaken by his wife, his friends and his town, as the clock nears noon, Kane is alone, death far more likely than glory, his principles having compelled him to finish the job that the faceless bureaucrats up north, with their springing of Miller, had given him. He may have flinched once or twice from that fate in the previous two hours, but he was ready now.

Crudup is marvellous as Kane, with a great actor’s understanding of how to command space without resort to gesticulation and shouting. We feel the trauma, the courage, the doubt not because he’s telling us, but because he leads us to the places in his psychology where they reside. 

The emotional weight of the play is, in another surprise for me, carried by the two women in his life, his new wife Amy and his ex-lover, Mrs Ramirez. Denise Gough is wonderful as Mrs Kane, a title she disowns so swiftly after its acquisition. She skilfully manages the transition from a giddy newlywed instantly plunged into the kind of ethical question that is best left to an ethics seminar, but this time with the stakes sky-high. It is the very presence of such strong convictions that sends the shiver down our backs, Gough pressing on those buttons without ever indulging in anachronistic histrionics.

Rosa Salazar is a revelation as the Mexican widow, Helen Ramirez, with a string of lovers behind her but a fierce intelligence that allows her to pursue a quiet reckoning with a town that wants her body and her money, but underestimates her wisdom and steel. In an electrifying scene, she unpacks the choices Amy has until she has only one and issues a forthright challenge. That Gough, an award-laden mantlepiece at home of course, pulls this off is to be expected, but, after stellar performances on screen, this is Salazar’s first stage credit. It won’t be her last.

Roll in a fine support cast (who just about avoid straying into "The Johnson Scene" in Blazing Saddles), incidental music from the likes of Bruce Springsteen and Ry Cooder (all beautifully sung) and Neil Austin’s lighting that suggests that flat, hard desert sun once seen, never forgotten, and it’s a strong production all round.

What earns the final star above is not the adaptation’s subtle relevance nor its urgent pacing but the fact that though there’s an inevitable corniness to the plot, some 73 years after the film’s release, I was moved. I was there in the room with Kane as he failed to find the trust of his erstwhile supporters, with Amy as she wrestled with her conscience and ultimately left admiring a man who could do what I can’t (yet) in these difficult days for the world - The Right Thing.     

High Noon at the Harold Pinter Theatre until 6 March