It looms menacingly until the fatal crash and is perched ominously above Frank and Cora’s lives

It looms menacingly until the fatal crash, and is perched ominously above Frank and Cora’s lives after it. Those with fond memories of either of the films that James M Cain’s novella spawned will find that, with Bailey’s assured direction drawing fine performances all round, Andrew Rattenbury’s adaptation of this shabby little shocker has their stomach tightening in expectation of grim violence and steamy sex.
The shadowy darkness against which much of the action is played makes visible the uncomfortable fact that the three central characters are on the scrapheap of life. Joseph Alessi makes a sympathetic case for Nick Papadakis, owner of the isolated roadside diner, callously dismissed by his bored wife Cora as a greasy Greek geek. Alessi plays him like a puppy, desperate to be loved and panting to love. But the former Iowa high-school beauty queen who ended up in a hash-house before escaping into this dead-end marriage is set alight not by nice Nick but by grimy Frank, whom Nick takes on as a repair guy. One sensed the initial enthusiasm of a capacity audience turning uncertain as the real pain behind the musical fun and games gradually emerged..

Bunny Christie’s enterprising set works well, except in one or two scenes when having the sparsely furnished diner remaining on stage begs the audience to turn a blind eye.Hanging over practically the entire show is the car in which Frank sends Nick to his death. After making love like crazy, they turn to fighting like cats.Bailey has captured the twisted tale’s film-noir mood brilliantly. Ingenious cinematic cuts, cunning dissolves and chiaroscuro lighting keep the intricate and intriguing sequence of events fast-paced. Only the inclusion of a ghostly, bloodied Nick during the lovers’ final encounter in the diner feels odd.

It quickly turns out he’s intent on servicing more than auto parts, and Cora is soon ripping off her knickers. From the moment the stage opens up to reveal the reversing lights of a truck, the theatre reverberating with the sound of a revving engine, and a drifter, Frank Chambers, spilling on to the gravelly road, there’s a compelling edge to Lucy Bailey’s production of The Postman Always Rings Twice. The genial quirks and vulgarities of the dear old British comedy overture genre that it invokes are continually contradicted or short-circuited; almost nothing follows through as one expects. Not a hint of irony was to be heard in this panoply of sub-Waltonian fanfares and luscious Puccini-esque tunes – only a superior skill in melodic structure and orchestral texture that ought to put such latter-day practitioners as James Horner of Titanic fame to shame. But scoring films is an applied art, in which a composer has to fulfil prescribed requirements.

With Arnold, the problems tended to proliferate the more directly he sought to express himself.Even in such ostensibly lighter works as Beckus the Dandipratt (1943), which first made his name, the continuity is by no means obvious. Yet even under the crisp direction of that veteran upholder of the Great British Musical Tradition, Vernon Handley, the portrait that emerged remained as puzzling as ever.In one sense, the most revealing item was Arnold’s film score for The Inn of the Sixth Happiness (1958), in that it shows a composer absolutely at one with the clich?of the genre, and of his time. With an intimate biography on sale, a harrowing television documentary pending, and the object of it all too frail to attend, this concert – the central event of a South Bank mini-festival – was a strange occasion.
Sixty-three years after the London Philharmonic first employed a brilliant 19-year old student trumpeter called Malcolm Arnold, it was understandable that the orchestra should seek to celebrate his subsequent achievements with the broadest possible range of his music. As Tannion and Kongerod dance, the letters spread out to the sides, giving them halos.Pure dance moments give the eye some relief from the whirling images Kongerod and Tannion are strong, athletic dancers. In one duet, they echo each other – as he throws his leg up for a handstand, she kicks high beside him. Clinches are pragmatic; not emotional: they clamber over each other.