"I can't live – I can only imagine." So says Alfred Hitchcock in David Rudkin's stage play, adapted from his 1993 BBC radio play exploring the art and psyche of Alfred Hitchcock. The Lovesong of Alfred J Hitchcock had a well-received debut in Leicester last fall and the same production is coming to New York for the play's U.S. debut at 59E59 Theaters May 1-25. Martin Miller stars as Hitchcock, with, tellingly, his wife and his mother both played by Roberta Kerr. Tom McHugh and Anthony Wise round out the cast and Jack McNamara directs.
The Guardian called it a "rich, multilayered play that clearly stems from a lifelong love of its subject" and "a darkly riveting study of a film-maker who turned what his wife terms his 'crazy inner life' into public entertainment."
In the poem from which Rudkin derived the title for his play ("The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock") T.S. Eliot wrote, "I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker." Thirty-four years after his death, Hitchcock's moment of greatness has yet to flicker. New York City's Film Forum just presented a complete Hitchcock Retrospective. Hitchcock, a biopic starring Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren, came out in 2012. Productions of The 39 Steps are popping up on regional stages everywhere. The TV series Bates Motel starring Vera Farmiga and Freddie Highmore has just been renewed for a third season.
Why? Minnesota playwright Joseph Goodrich, author of a fictionalized play about Hitchcock called Panic, explains it this way: "He can't be figured out, he continues to intrigue us. His fears, creatively re-imagined and made glamorous, haunt us to this day."
For a close look at some of the fears – creative, glamorous, or otherwise – that quickened the mind of the Master of Suspense, The Lovesong of Alfred J Hitchcock, arriving Off-Broadway on May 1 at 59E59 Theaters, seems a frightfully good bet right now.
