David Rudkin’s 'The Lovesong of Alfred J Hitchcock'

But there's also the desolate crossroads scene in North by Northwest, where Cary Grant, dressed in a dapper business suit, dives into a cornfield to dodge a determined crop duster that’s trying to mow him down. And the terrifying playground scene in The Birds, where scores of black crows gather, one by one, on a jungle gym behind an unsuspecting Tippi Hedren (to the soundtrack of children singing a nursery rhyme). And Judy’s eerie, neon-lit transformation into Madeleine (both played by Kim Novak) before a transfixed Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo. The list goes on and on.

Tracing the source

So what about a look inside Alfred Hitchcock’s head to see where all that terrifying stuff is coming from? That’s where British playwright David Rudkin is inviting us to go, in his spellbinding, biographical black comedy, The Lovesong of Alfred J Hitchcock, now at 59 East 59th Street Theater as part of their Brits Off Broadway series.

Rudkin has had a lifelong fascination with the Master of Suspense and his seductive films, behind which, he sensed, was a haunted mind. Rudkin wrote a radio play about Hitchcock in 1993; then, in 2012, a young Nottingham director named Jack McNamara asked him to adapt it for the stage. Together, they’ve created a taut, theatrical psychodrama — both frightening and wickedly funny — that exposes the inner workings of Hitchcock’s creative mind.

When you walk into the small theater space, you’re greeted with a white upstage scrim and white stage floor, empty save for a film director’s chair. As you stare at this stark scenario, you hear the faint creepy sounds of birdcalls and train whistles (evocative of The Birds and North by Northwest, of course). Lights out and then up again on a striking sight of “Hitch” himself, in his trademark black suit, black tie, and white shirt, in his chair, as actor Martin Miller — a lookalike complete with receding hairline, protruding belly, and full, pouting lips — begins his riveting performance.

Hitchcock begins a stream-of-consciousness dialogue, revealing his creative process: “Black. Black hair, long: back of a woman’s head. . . . Black high heels, sound of them, tap, tap, tap.” (The narrative is deliberately evocative of T. S. Eliot’s "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," whose titular speaker Rudkin playfully links with Hitchcock because of the uncanny likeness of their names.) “I’m a man who lives in my images. I cannot just be,” Hitchcock explains later.

This creepy creative narrative continues throughout, as Hitchcock conjures up images in his mind. The play is punctuated by scenes with a young screenwriter (an ingenuous Tom McHugh), as they develop a scenario together.

Hearing voices

But the most persistent interruptions of Hitchcock’s inner narrative are images of people in his life who have caused him the most psychological damage. One is a punitive priest who scolds the child Hitchcock for breaking an egg, prompting the adult Hitchcock to repeat a litany of confessions, including “I have sinned” or “I am guilty of guilt.”

The chief architect of his repressed pychosexual development (as Rudkin imagines it), though, is Hitch's middle-class mother, Emma. She haunts him in scene after scene. In a sly performance by Roberta Kerr, Emma belies her benign appearance by recounting a story of how once she played a trick on her young son “Freddy,” laughed, and then whacked him, terrifying him out of his wits and causing him to have nightmares. (He later was hospitalized for psychosomatic paralysis and paranoia.) “I was not made for the world of living or loving,” he laments later.

As Rudkin sees it, the result of his traumatic relationship with his mother is a tormented obsession with sex and death that finds expression in his films. “Sex scenes on screen — they’re immoral because they are fake. You have to find a way to put the moral meaning on screen.” Judging from his films, that “moral meaning” is a mixture of terror and thrill. Obsessed with women (“beauty is cruel”, he says), Hitchcock exorcises his demons by killing them again and again.

In contrast, his wife Alma (also played by Kerr) is a loyal, supportive figure, though traumatized by her marriage to a tormented genius. “Love. It goes through me, that word, like a knife”, says Hitchcock, so Rudkin imagines what Alma had to endure. Privately, she’s horrified that her husband has murdered so many women on film. “What must the world think of me?” she wonders. My Life with a Serial Killer is the proposed title of a memoir she’s trying to write.

A clever collage

Director Jack McNamara skillfully employs a clever collage of Hitchcock techniques for his mise-en-scene. He creates creepy images behind the upstage scrim (Hitchcock’s father’s funeral, among others) with disturbing sound cues, evoking the vivid, frightening atmosphere of his films.

“Is it the price of my gift?” Hitchcock laments, as he struggles to express his torture through his films. In an interesting contrast, the 2012 biofilm Hitchcock shows his creative process from an external perspective. It focuses on the relationship between Hitchcock (a wily Anthony Hopkins) and Alma (a feisty Helen Mirren) during the making of Psycho, revealing Alma’s tremendous influence on his creative process — as his film editor, moral supporter, confidante, and ultimately codirector.

Together, Rudkin’s Lovesong of Alfred J. Hitchcock and Sacha Gervasi’s Hitchock give a composite portrait of the Master of Suspense and Menace. But my favorite moment comes from Martin Miller’s uncanny stage portrayal. At one point, he says to the audience:

“I’ve reached with my camera into you. BOO!”