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The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

Park Theatre, 22.0.14, with Marie, Chris, Anna, Eve and Selena

Five years ago, thanks to the virtuoso teaching style of Professor Judith Buchanan, we all became, for about a week, experts on Westerns. It’s no surprise, then, that a good portion of the team behind The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance are also Judith’s students, and most likely had their first encounter with the film in a dingy seminar room in Langwith. Apparently due to trouble with getting the rights, the stage adaptation is actually based on the original short story, but it is none the worse for that – for one thing, this version of the story fits comfortably within a single location: the saloon run by Hallie Jackson, and its differences from the film plot make it more streamlined, and, for those of us with that ‘Authors on Film’ module in common, less predictable.

It’s a great adaptation: funny, tense, extremely well acted, scored and lit. Just like the film, it starts and ends with the coffin of the John Wayne character, here not played by John Wayne, shockingly. The beginning, to be fair, is not its strongest moment. Robert Vaughan has exactly the right voice to provide the voiceovers, but they are just a bit kitsch, and it takes a while to get the balance of exposition and atmosphere right. In the opening scene, there’s a very evocative silent funeral going on, and then a completely innocuous bit of dialogue (‘when were you last here?’ ‘a long time ago’ ‘and when did you last see not-John Wayne?’ ‘the last time I was here’) is followed with a gorgeous choral version of ‘Wayfaring Stranger.’

Once we flash back to the wilder days of the small western settlement, the play hits its stride. Niamh Walsh as Hallie is spectacularly acerbic (especially when mocking ‘tenderfoot’ Ransome Foster over his notion that her parents might have been carried off by the Cherokee) but also convincingly vulnerable. Oliver Lansley as Foster and Paul Albertson as ‘Bert Barricune’ (that’s not-John Wayne) complement each other beautifully, though Lansley, perhaps deliberately, has a more self-aware performance style which makes him seem a little out of place among the rest of the cast. The titular baddie gunslinger, in true Western style, doesn’t make an appearance until just before the interval, but James Marlowe makes a brilliantly unpredictable psychopath, switching between uncanny stillness and mile-a-minute, flamboyant philosophising. The scene before the interval when he bullies Lanre Malaolu’s naïve, optimistic Jim into a game of liar dice is almost unbearably tense. He also ends the act by looking archly over his shoulder at the audience on his way out the door; it’s camp, but so well-lit and well-composed that it makes a perfect act-ending tableau.

The production values are pretty sumptuous all round. The saloon set looks convincingly lived-in, and everyone drinks inordinate amounts of ‘whiskey’ (and splashes quite a lot of ‘whiskey’ all over the stage). Costumes are lovely period pieces, not sticking to the conventional Stetson and jeans but including a whole range of waistcoats and an impressive array of hats, not to mention three fabulous dresses for Hallie, once she is persuaded to dress up for the theatre and later when she adapts to Foster’s fancy big city ways.

The play they attend, incidentally, is The Taming of the Shrew, and Foster uses several Shakespearean sonnets to teach the locals about civilization, and at this point I’m not sure whether the transformative power of Shakespeare is a tired cliché or a self-aware trope – either way, Westerns are so cliché-heavy that it’s hard to complain about here. It’s fun to see some of the Western-specific cinematic tropes transmediated onto the stage, and very successfully, too.