The Guardian (25/Jan/2001) - Farley Granger: Hitchcock veteran finally makes his West End debut
(c) The Guardian (25/Jan/2001)
- http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Guardian/0,,427725,00.html
- keywords: Alfred Hitchcock, Farley Granger, New York City, New York, Noël Coward, Rope (1948), Strangers on a Train (1951)
Hitchcock veteran finally makes his West End debut
The latest American film star heading for a West End stage debut has left it rather late: Farley Granger, best known for Alfred Hitchcock's 1948 and 1951 classics, Rope, and Strangers on a Train, is coming to London next month at the age of 72.
He will appear in Semi-Monde, a Noel Coward play written in 1926, but regarded as so shocking that it has never been staged in England. The play was banned by the lord chamberlain in 1926, but was never staged even after theatre censorship was lifted in 1968 partly because of the vast cast. Coward wrote it for 37 actors, but producer Thelma Holt has ruthlessly pruned it and got it down to a cast of 28.
Star gazers will have to look hard at the programme to spot Mr Farley's name. The cast is listed in alphabetical order, so Mr Granger, whose film career began in The North Star in 1943, when he was 17, appears half way down the list in a cast which includes John Carlisle, Nicola McAuliffe, Sophie Ward and Frances Tomelty.
Mr Granger was originally talent spotted by Sam Goldwyn, in a tiny part in a stage play - he said his role consisted of running on, shouting "fire!", then racing off to come back as another one word character.
He eventually bought himself out of his Goldwyn contract to study acting and appear on the New York stage in the 1950s. Since then he has appeared in dozens of films, television dramas and hundreds of stage plays.
He is an old friend of producer Thelma Holt, and they have been discussing a London venture for years. He will play a White Russian emigre in the Coward play, which is set in the febrile world of society London between the wars, in the cocktail bar of the Ritz Hotel through which a carnival procession of the smart set passes. He will also be, Ms Holt said: "One of the few straight men in the whole thing."
"The problem with Semi-Monde was sex," she said. "The play is riddled with it. There was never any chance of it getting past the lord chamberlain. The sexual preferences of the cast are made absolutely clear: there are gay men, and lesbian women, and worst of all, adulterers."
The show opens at the Lyric Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue on May 21, for a 16-week run. It was never staged in Coward's lifetime. The Glasgow Citizens' Theatre staged the world premiere of Semi-Monde in 1977, four years after Coward's death.
There has also been one small American production: Ms Holt cherishes a review which appeared under the headline "Two queens and a dyke".
"They got that completely wrong," she said gleefully last night. "There's far more than one dyke in it."
