Writer: Eric Roth
Director: Thea Sharrock
There is a reason the 1952 film High Noon, directed by Fred Zinnemann from a screenplay by Carl Foreman, has become one of the most beloved movie Westerns. While its contemporaries focused on standoffs and shootouts, here everything is about the emotional build-up, a ticking time bomb as Gary Cooper’s retired Marshal Will Kane prepares to face off with the killer he had expected to hang, but who is arriving on the midday train to exact his revenge.
Eric Roth’s stage adaptation strives to retain that sense of tension, with Tim Hatley’s wooden set design situated under a none-too-subtle clock slowly creeping towards 12 o’clock. Here, Cooper’s stoicism is replaced by Billy Crudup as a much more nervy, at times charismatic, Kane. Opening with a wedding between Kane and Denise Gough’s Amy in which the couple use their vows to dump a whole load of exposition in the show’s first few minutes (she’s a Quaker opposed to violence, he loves her so much he’s hanging up his badge and guns after 17 years to retire to life as a shopkeeper), Thea Sharrock’s production includes a little bit of line dancing as the marital festivities get under way.
Music is riven throughout this production, not all of it helpful. Alongside strains of Do Not Forsake Me, the tune most associated with the film, are other numbers, most notably three Bruce Springsteen songs. Unfortunately, their placement and usage feel largely redundant, with one scene after another finishing with Gough performing a mournful rendition of a stanza from I’m On Fire that feels neither dramatically nor thematically relevant. It almost feels as if, once the production team secured the rights to use the songs, they felt honour-bound to include them, whether or not they serve any purpose beyond giving the cast time to set up the props for the next scene.
Such frippery bites into the scope for tension as the clock ticks down, Kane comes out of retirement only minutes old, and finds that no townsfolk will stand by him against the returning Frank Miller. The murky ethics of Western life are presented in a way that makes similarities to the modern day seem both stark and predictable: discussions about Miller’s release by politicians who care little about the people elicit both titters and sighs from the audience. More interesting are the quandaries of some town residents, some of whom see Kane’s presence as a lightning rod for Miller’s return.
There is a sense throughout that Roth is checking off scenes from the film, including one where a townsman urges his wife to tell Kane that he is not home to avoid joining the Marshals’ posse. In a later scene, the same actor is eager to join before being dissuaded. While the ensemble often plays different townsfolk, there is so little to each character that it is impossible to tell whether these are two different roles or just a very indecisive man.
More interesting is Rosa Salazar’s Helen Ramirez, a woman who was previously romantically involved with both Kane and Miller. Sharrock’s direction attempts to make Helen seem imperious and upright, but instead makes her come across as static and rooted to the spot in ways that do neither character nor actress justice. Still, the sizzling interplay between Salazar and Gough forms the play’s greatest strength.
Crudup himself brings his trademark restless, smirking energy, which makes his predicament feel less urgent and personal than it should. As a result, the showdown never quite reaches the epic scale needed. Coupled with a simplification of the film’s final, dramatic action scene, High Noon’s denouement feels anticlimactic.
As with the Westerns of the time, gunshot wounds are inflicted without blood being spilt, victims falling silently (if sometimes slowly) to the floor. That forms an appropriate conclusion to a stage adaptation that itself feels like bloodless play-acting.
Runs until 6 March 2026
