James Stewart

The trouble with British playwright David Rudkin's stage play, "The Love Song of Alfred J Hitchcock," is that it started life as a radio play and it hasn't escaped very far from the radio studio. Still a play for voices, Rudkin's script has a great many introspective monologues by the iconic director but not much action, a strange choice for a story of a director whose movies are loaded with incident. The play assumes a great in-depth knowledge of the director's work: such movies as "Marnie," "Vertigo," "Strangers on a Train," "Psycho," "The Birds" and "Frenzy" are referred to tangentially but remain unnamed. It would take a film historian to track down all the references but apparently the play is expected to stand on its own which will confuse many theatergoers. [more]