High Noon at Harold Pinter Theatre
Come the midway point of High Noon, a new staging of the much-loved Gary Cooper-Grace Kelly Western, two women experience a clash of beliefs. The first, Amy Fowler (Denise Gough), is a recently married Quaker staring down the imminent death of her husband (Billy Crudup’s Marshal Will Kane) and the return of the same gun violence that led her to embrace her faith. The second, Helen Ramirez (Rosa Salazar), is a saloon owner whose grit and enterprising spirit have enabled her not only to survive, but thrive in spite of the disadvantages imposed by her race and gender. The two are locked in a thorny, possibly unbridgeable conflict over the question of when – or if – to resort to violence in defence of one’s own interests, gun violence to be exact. The Quaker is firmly opposed on religious grounds; the weary sceptic sees no other recourse in the face of oppression. Still, there is common ground enough, as both have a song in their hearts. Having commiserated over their histories, their opposed worldviews, and their men, the two proceed in newfound, mutual understanding and admiration, and launch into a solemn a capella belt of Bruce Springsteen’s I’m on Fire.
This is not the first appearance of the Boss’s hymn to quivering lust across the play’s fairly fleet 100 minutes (still longer than the film by roughly 20 minutes, but certainly compact for the West End). Indeed, it seems that every scene in which Amy features would be incomplete without a final, hushed recitation, directed outwards toward the crowd with as much spiritual anguish as Gough can muster, exhorting us to feel, to understand… something. For a show that largely proceeds in a straight, unfussy line, faithfully transplanting its namesake intact, these interludes are the sole intrusion of crazed dream logic on offer, and they never lose their power to confound and delight.
Playwright Eric Roth, a reliable Hollywood old hand in his theatre debut, has been keen to emphasise his desire not to render High Noon as a musical. Given the abundance of musicals and comparative scarcity of any Westerns told straight-faced and without embellishment in the theatre, it’s a fair position to take, one left adrift by the fact that Roth’s High Noon itches to take musical flight throughout. So infatuated is this small 19th-century town with the music of Springsteen that the mind wanders to the potential of expansion into a full, toe-tapping jukebox extravaganza, and whether Roth’s play – sturdy enough, if lacking that little something extra – may have benefited from it.
One can well enough imagine swaggering baddie Frank Miller (James Doherty) rasping a fire and brimstone Leonard Cohen tune, while the musical province of our hero – Crudup’s beleaguered lawman – seems to be more with the lonesome wail of Hank Williams. And given the pleasingly elegiac vocals she flexes throughout, it’s tempting to think on what Gough could do with Linda Ronstadt’s Long Long Time, a song of grief for a love that can never fully belong to the singer. Frankly, it’s much more fitting for her and Will’s union – a day old but already tortured – than I’m on Fire. Perhaps one daydreams (evening-dreams?) of musical effervescence so vividly during High Noon for the simple reason that Amy’s 80s pop-flavoured laments, while arriving somewhere close to camp, are nonetheless reaching for something sublime, something Roth and director Thea Sharrock have more trouble locating in the story itself. It may simply be that Will Kane is a problem neither they nor Crudup is much able to solve.
On the big screen, High Noon, Cooper’s careworn, craggy features only permit the smallest hint of distress to escape when his Kane learns of the imminent arrival of a vengeful outlaw he once put away. From there, Fred Zinneman’s film functions as a test of its leading man’s ability to retain his stoicism in the face of encroaching death, a conundrum that’s friendly to a close-up but less so to the stage. Crudup is largely adrift trying to determine just who his protagonist is supposed to be in this new setting, combating early assertions of his strong and silent nature by venting his code of honour to Amy, old flame Helen and tragically soused deputy Harvey Pell (Billy Howle with the show’s best, most keenly felt performance) alike. Where Cooper remained stiff upper-lipped, Crudup’s Kane cries out in indignant fury. A more tender, even boyish read of a character so steeped in Old Hollywood manliness is admirable, but there is little undergirding the character here, no sense that those onstage understand him any better than we ultimately do.
There are other criticisms that one can lodge at Roth’s High Noon. There’s the insistent triple underlining of the material’s themes, which pertained in 1952 to the push-pull of cowardice and conviction in the face of McCarthyism, but require little (and yet plenty) re-tuning before they begin to shriek “Trump! Trump! Trump!”. There’s the fact that, even with a ticking clock mounted above the stage to infuse urgency, the play’s midsection can feel unhurried, even relaxed. And yet, it is hard not to feel some measure of affection for the show, even protectiveness. There’s something charming – adorable, even – about the cornball sincerity of it all, the earnest, wholehearted belief in the power of all-American chivalry, love and Bruce Springsteen to triumph over conniving evil and our differences, restoring a just balance in the world. Come play’s end, lovers embrace to the Boss’s own gravelly tones, booming of a land of hope and dreams. Entering 2026, it may just break your heart a little that some still insist on the importance of a dream.
While clumsy and lacking in the laser focus of its source material, this new stage adaptation of a classic is endearingly earnest and unabashed in its sentimentality. One only wishes it more boldly embraced its own flights of fancy.
Thomas Messner
Photos: Johan Persson
High Noon is at Harold Pinter Theatre until 6th March 2026. For further information or to book, visit the theatre’s website here.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram
YouTube
RSS