Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel The Talented Mr Ripley continues to hold a fascination. This Sydney Theatre Company production from director Sarah Goodes and playwright Joanna Murray-Smith follows some notable adaptations, including Anthony Minghella’s 1999 film and the recent 1960s-set Netflix series from Steven Zaillian.
It is set, like the novel and film, in the 1950s, but is rather more faithful to Highsmith’s narrative. And, unlike the series, refreshingly, all the young actors are in their twenties.
Tom (Will McDonald), a struggling New Yorker surviving on petty crime, is contacted by Herbert Greenleaf (Andrew McFarlane), the shipping magnate father of Dickie (Raj Labade), who is living a dissolute expat life on the Italian Riviera.
Greenleaf is anxious to see his son return from Italy to the family business. Overstating his connection with Dickie, Tom accepts Greenleaf’s coin to return Dickie to the family fold.
In the fictional resort town of Mongibello, Tom contrives a beach meeting with Dickie and his friend Marge (Claude Scott-Mitchell). Attracted to both Dickie and his lifestyle, Tom slowly ingratiates himself into their circle, which includes Freddie (Faisal Hamza), who takes an instant dislike to him.
As Tom becomes ever more infatuated, he realises that Dickie, tiring of his neediness, is about to dump him. On a rented runabout, Tom bludgeons Dickie to death with an oar. Assuming Dickie’s identity, Tom has to avoid being caught out by the increasingly suspicious Marge and Freddie, and the Italian police. Can he pull it off in a place where privilege can’t be faked?
Goodes and Murray-Smith emphasise Tom’s gaucheness in a single moment. With the stage adorned with beautiful (and not so beautiful) characters and lit in the bright summer hues of an Italian seaside, Tom wears a monochromatic flannel suit to a beach meet.
An interloper ill at ease, McDonald imbues Tom with a physical awkwardness, like a butterfly trying to escape a chrysalis shell. Labade’s Dickie, on the other hand, is all smooth grooves. His Fred Astaire dance moves in a later nightclub scene are charged with homoeroticism.
Marge doubts Tom’s believability from the get-go; her perspicacity is equal to her snobbery. We observe the casual cruelty of Dickie’s initial dismissiveness and Freddie’s instant condescending dislike.
Why would anyone want to be involved with these people? Well, the answer is that Tom is a grifter, always looking for a way up and out, and he sees what he desperately wants. Truth is, though, they’re all grifters of one sort or another.
Marge, from a middle-class Milwaukee family, is as much in love with Dickie’s lifestyle as Dickie himself. Dickie’s dilettante tendencies are handsomely subsidised by family wealth. Freddie is an entitled débauché. Their insular world is so opaque to outsiders that it’s no wonder we root for Tom.
The acting is consistently very good. McDonald and Labade have an easy chemistry and play off each other with confidence. Claude Scott-Mitchell makes Marge a feisty, clear-sighted foil for Tom’s lies.
Faisal Hamza plays Freddie with a prickly, suspicious privilege. Andrew McFarlane, as a credulous Greenleaf Senior, wears an atrocious wig with aplomb. Johnny Nasser gives us a great Italian police officer.
It is hard to put a finger on why Tom Ripley has become embedded in the social consciousness. Is it a voyeuristic remove that permits us to root for the opportunist, or the killer?
Murray-Smith’s creative decision to have an older and successful Tom narrate this period of his life gives perhaps some truth to the argument that we’re happy to see the killer win. It also permits the audience access to his thoughts, so we feel his shame, insecurity, resilience, desperation and repressed desire.
And McDonald narrates in delicious, compelling style. Here, the mics are a mixed blessing. While dialogue is crystal, amplification conspires somewhat against the actors’ ability to impart nuance in their delivery.
A greater problem with the regular narration, though, is that it reduces tension, taking the audience out of the drama. As does, by way of (over)emphasising the black comedy, the odd spot of mugging. It’s a delicate balance to strike and doesn’t quite come off.
There is some wonderfully executed staging that emphasises the play’s themes. Elizabeth Gadsby’s design is stunningly filmic, employing moving horizontal and vertical surfaces that alter scale and perspective.
Simple mobile props suffice for scene changes, evocatively used. We see, for example, as Tom dresses in Dickie’s clothes, his fractured, uncertain identity reflected in triptych in the wardrobe mirrors, echoing Minghella’s use of reflection.
Visually arresting too is Dickie’s suspension in vertiginous space against a stunningly lit suggestion of open water, flailing slowly, a drowning man.
There is clearly a lot of gloss in this production, so Emma White’s costuming introduces a small taste of the inherent seediness of the novel with a shabby-chic aesthetic. Steve Francis’ dramatic composition and almost subliminal sound design (the drip and gurgle of water, the faint ticking of a clock) ratchet the tension beautifully.
Sydney Theatre Company’s The Talented Mr Ripley is a welcome addition to the Ripley adaptation canon. It portrays Tom Ripley perhaps not so much a chameleon but an Etch-A-Sketch, willing to erase himself and redraw. It boasts some confident acting and stunning design. You don’t need to have seen Ripley before; this production stands very confidently on its own merits.
Sydney Theatre Company’s The Talented Mr Ripley runs to 28 September at Rosyln Packer Theatre, 22 Hickson Road Walsh Bay NSW 2000.
It then transfers to Arts Centre Melbourne from 28 October.
Tickets: https://www.sydneytheatre.com.au/whats-on/productions/2025/the-talented-mr-ripley
Website: https://www.sydneytheatre.com.au/
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Photo credits: Prudence Upton
