Double Indemnity review – leaden drama turns crime classic into a very cold case

Churchill theatre, Bromley
James M Cain’s hard-bitten novella gained bleak power on screen but this version, giving Mischa Barton her UK stage debut, loses its flinty edge

The West End’s woeful High Noon showed how hard it is to put a western on stage. How about another rugged American genre, the film noir? James M Cain’s cynical, gripping 1936 novella was sharpened for the 1944 movie by director Billy Wilder and his co-writer, Raymond Chandler. This theatrical adaptation, previously seen in a 2016 Melbourne Theatre Company version, unwisely reinstates most of the bits they trimmed or tightened for the film. Tom Holloway’s script covers the same ground but with new diluted dialogue and Oscar Toeman’s production has fatal problems with pacing.

Cain’s LA insurance salesman Walter Huff became Walter Neff on screen; Holloway restores his original name yet adds a recurring joke that others forget what he is called. It makes the point that, as crime novelist James Lee Burke has written, Cain’s characters “are ordinary people, much like ourselves”. That’s further stressed in a prologue where Huff (Ciarán Owens) amiably addresses the audience, a technique that is overused throughout and adds layers of exposition, most pertinently about a country still reeling from the Great Depression.