The Talented Mr Ripley: Play

Description

The first stage adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's famous crime novel Tom Ripley is a criminal with an ambiguous past. He is sent to Italy by a wealthy financier to try and coax home the rich man's son. In the process Ripley becomes both attracted and seduced, finding the murder the only way to deal with the situation. From that point Ripley tries to cover up his crime. Patricia Highsmith's beguiling tale of morality and amorality is given a dramatic rendering by contemporary dramatist Phyllis Nagy, who knew Highsmith in her later years in Paris. "Each play I see by Phyllis Nagy confirms me in the belief that she is the finest playwright to have emerged in the 1990s" (Financial Times)

Patricia Highsmith was born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921. Her first novel, Strangers On A Train, was made into a film by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951. The Talented Mr Ripley, published in 1955, was awarded the Edgar Allan Poe Scroll by the Mystery Writers of America and introduced the fascinating anti-hero Tom Ripley, who was to appear in many of her later crime novels. Patricia Highsmith died in Locarno, Switzerland, in February 1995. Her last novel, Small g: A Summer Idyll, was published posthumously just over a month later. Phyllis Nagy was born in New York City and has lived in London since 1992. Her plays, including Weldon Rising, Butterfly Kiss, Disappeared and The Strip, have been produced throughout the world and have received awards including the Writers' Guild of Great Britain Award, a Mobil Prize, a Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the Eileen Anderson/Central Television Award, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and a McKnight Foundation Fellowship. Phyllis is currently under commission to the Royal Shakespeare Company, Nottingham Playhouse and the Royal Court Theatre, where she was recently writer-in-residence. She has adapted Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr Ripley for the Watford Palace Theatre while Never Land, opened at the Royal Court Theatre in January 1998, while her version of Chekov's The Seagull was produced at Chichester Festival Theatre in the summer of 2003.

'Nagy's adaptation is dreamlike; scenes blur, and the players in Ripley's psychotic game - all of them, as far as he's concerned, dispensable - loom like grotesque caricatures.' * Sam Marlowe, The Times, 22.9.10 * 'it often feels as if there is a tension in Phyllis Nagy's hugely intelligent adaptation between the mechanics of murder and the metaphysics.' * Lyn Gardner, Guardian, 23.9.10 * 'The play [...] is cunningly planned, with details accruing until we realise taht the whole thing is taking place in Ripley's mind's eye.' * Maxie Szalwinska, Sunday Times, 3.10.10 *