Haven’t we come across this somewhere before? Man the Predator, whose interest is only in conquest. And then, when they finally come to the tumble in the hay, she falls in love with him, as 20-year-old gels are wont to do, but he’s proved his point and immediately loses interest. Wait a minute! Wait a minute! Exactly how much disbelief are we expected to suspend here? A 47-year-old single male lecturer alone on an island with a feisty 20-year-old blonde (Sarah Kennedy), and she doesn’t think there’s a sexual agenda? It’s 1999, for goodness sake. First there’s Hitchcock himself (played magnificently by Danny Murphy), auditioning an anxious young blonde bimbo and then there’s a modern academic Alex (Joss McWilliam), whose field is the semiotics of film, persuading one of his B-students (young, female and of course blonde) to spend three weeks with him on a Greek island to try and recover some ancient fragments of film that might reveal the truth about Hitchcock’s past. Who knows? And, many people might say, who cares? But for a playwright in search of a story, there’s enough material to make the quest worth the effort, and so Terry Johnson, multi-award-winning British playwright, has given it his own twist, by exploring two stories simultaneously. Was he impotent (he only had one child, and remained faithful to his wife all his life)? Was he gay but in the closet? Was he so obsessed with one of his earliest heroines, the quintessential blonde Madeleine Carroll, who was his leading lady in the 1935 thriller The Thirty-Nine Steps, that he kept trying to recreate her in all his other films? Who can forget Ingrid Bergman, Tippi Hedren, Grace Kelly, Kim Novak, Eva Marie Saint and of course Janet Leigh in Psycho exquisitely dressed, but icy and remote? Roger Ebert, film critic of the Chicago Sunday Times, has suggested that their costumes subtly combined fashion with fetishism, and that they mesmerised the men, who often had physical or psychological handicaps.Īcademics desperate for thesis topics immediately seize on patterns such as these, and many a PhD has been written about Hitchcock’s psychological hang-ups. Alfred Hitchcock may not have been a gentleman, but he certainly preferred blondes, and exploited them shamelessly in his films.

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