Ladies and gents, I’m sorry to do this, but I’m going to have to say something about Hitchcock Blonde, the ADC’s latest production, that I never thought I’d say about anything or to anyone ever. Here it is: I’m not angry that this play wasn’t as good as I expected. I’m disappointed. Very disappointed. Much as I tried to leave my expectations at the auditorium door, the hype generated by a fortnight’s worth of publicity packed with images of sexy blondes, hacked celluloid and nonchalantly half-finished drinks generated a tidal wave of excitement that, from the play’s opening scenes, swiftly turned into nothing more than a small and rather underwhelming puddle of awkward lines and people gratuitously getting their tits out.

To be fair, though I’m unimpressed with the play as a whole, it did have some redeeming features. The mysterious film reel, whose plot is being unravelled throughout the play, is beautifully evocative of Hitchcock’s work and contains some gorgeously arranged stills, which frankly I could have happily watched in lieu of the action on stage. That’s not to say that all of the roles were badly put together: Simon Haines’ performance as Alex, a semiotics professor in a mid-life crisis, was compellingly and brilliantly natural amongst a crowd of shrieking stereotypes. In fact, he looked like a normal person who’d somehow wandered into the midst of a Hitchcock-based panto, complete with its very own desperate, self-importantly garrulous blonde and a whining, self-pitying media student who’s out to ‘find herself’. There was even a part when said student talked about herself as though she were two girls – the normal one and the off-the-rails one she was afraid Alex might not be able to love. Oh per-lease. Vomworthy.

However, after sitting through an hour of this, what really began to grate was the way that characters constantly sustained two entirely different conversations at once. It was funny for all of about five seconds of any given scene. After this, my patience began to wear thin as the play became increasingly dull and disjointed. Hitchcock himself (Will Seaward) was the guiltiest culprit, drivelling on about Dover sole, after about ten frustrating minutes of which, if anyone had so much as mentioned fish to me again, my first reflex would either have been to weep uncontrollably or simply to punch them in the face. Matters were not helped along by the way that, in an attempt to inject some interest, some of the characters had nude scenes that I still cannot justify as having any coherence in the context of the play as a whole, especially after Hitchcock’s more interesting musings on how to capture nudity without showing someone explicitly naked.

It was the play’s ending that disappointed me most. Long before it had properly finished, it felt as though it was drawing to a quiet and unassuming close, in which Hitchcock and Alex have an implausible conversation about his obsession with blondes, cut with whiny student’s thoughts on life after the breakdown of her relationship with Alex. Short of beaming Hitchcock up off the stage, there was no way such an anti-climactic ending could be saved. The reason I’m so disappointed is that Hitchcock Blonde wasn’t an entirely bad play: it’s just that it could have been so much better.