Theatre
Michael Portillo - At death's door
Published 27 June 2005
Theatre - There's little life left in a classic tale of murder and deception, writes Michael Portillo
The Postman Always Rings Twice
Playhouse Theatre, London WC2
Boy meets married girl; girl persuades boy to help murder her husband for the insurance; boy and girl double-cross each other. The genre is familiar to us largely through the works of James M Cain, whose prose provided the stories for the Hollywood movies Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice.
Both tales were based on the real-life case of Ruth Snyder and her lover Judd Gray. Snyder made several attempts to bump off her husband before getting Gray to help in a final effort that was successful but messy. She had secretly taken out a $50,000 policy on her husband's life with a double-indemnity clause. She arranged with the postman that the payment coupons for the policy would be delivered to her only, and that he would always ring twice.
The planning of the murder was amateurish. Damon Runyon, who followed the case, described it as the "dumb-bell murder: it was so dumb". At the trial, Snyder and Gray were convicted in an hour and a half, and they went to the electric chair on the same January morning in 1928. As if America were not already en-thralled enough by the case, the New York Daily News carried a photograph of Snyder taken at the moment the volts hit her.
Millions of Americans gobbled up the lurid details of the Snyder case, but none wrote it down so well as Cain did. He was credited with inventing a hard-boiled style of dialogue. He protested that he did no more than record the ordinary American's vividness of speech "that goes beyond anything I could invent". By sticking to "this heritage, this logos of the American countryside", he wrote, "I shall attain a maximum of effectiveness with very little effort". That was too modest, perhaps. There is a kind of genius involved in re-creating on paper the speech patterns that we hear around us every day.
In writing The Postman Always Rings Twice, Cain felt little need to embellish the Snyder case. He moved the time from pre- to post-Wall Street crash, and the action from New York to California. "Cheap Des Moines trollops" like his anti-heroine Cora Papadakis were flocking to Hollywood hoping for screen tests and ending up "in the hash house" within a week. With wage rates driven down to 15 cents an hour by high unemployment, young men such as Frank Chambers drifted between jobs and petty crime. As the studios flourished, car ownership in the state soared, providing opportunities for men such as Nick Papadakis to live comfortably from a roadside restaurant (as long as it had a good neon sign).
In the stage version of Postman (in a new adaptation by Andrew Rattenbury, which has reached London's West End from the West Yorkshire Playhouse), Cora Papadakis, like Ruth Snyder, has more than one go at killing her husband. As in the real case, the police investigators manage to turn the lovers against each other. There are a few twists, but you know it is not going to end well for the murderers.
Val Kilmer has followed the path of many Hollywood giants in coming to London to tread the boards for a meagre fee. His large frame and familiarly square, good-looking head hold the audience's attention throughout the evening, but his performance did little for me. He plays Chambers, an uninteresting and unintelligent man, and in a sense he does it too well. He has mastered an inarticulate drawl that is as convincing as it is dull. In Act II, when he is wrapped up in bandages following a car accident, his performance becomes still more restrained, and the drawl intensified by facial bruising.
Joe Alessi as Nick Papadakis, the Greek-immigrant husband, is far less intelligible than Kilmer. Charlotte Emmerson, however, makes an excellent Cora. She produces real sexual steam as she slinks around seductively, carrying food and condiments in her husband's restaurant. She shimmies off his bids for conjugal rights, but submits masochistically to Chambers's brutal lovemaking.
It's a pity the director, Lucy Bailey, could not produce tension as well as steam. There is a moment when Chambers and Cora are about to kill Nick, and a state trooper arrives, lured like a moth by that neon sign. We ought to have been sweating, but weren't.
What does shock is the violence, and the wonderful stagecraft with a car that becomes the murder weapon; it crashes through the set and hangs like an accusing finger pointed at Chambers during his police interrogation in Act II. Congratulations to the designer, Bunny Christie. Nick's ghost makes an appearance, and Alessi also doubles as Katz, one of the couple's accusers. Both devices underline that Chambers and Cora are a latter-day Lord and Lady Macbeth.
Cain's two versions of the Snyder murder still have some life left in them - but to judge by this production, not very much.
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