Don’t tell my mum, but I spent a fair bit of my teenage years watching VHS rentals of films I probably shouldn’t have been watching. And Single White Female was definitely one of them. Turn back the clock thirty years and it was the era of the erotic thriller. Blockbuster shelves were packed with titles promising danger, obsession, and a certain breathless campiness set to haunting violins. No one would say that the 1992 film was particularly good, but it had zest. It knew what it was: a pulpy thriller about a woman so desperate to have an identity that she absorbed someone else’s wholesale. The term “going all Single White Female” on someone entered the cultural lexicon alongside “bunny boiler,” and that doesn’t happen by accident. These films understood their assignment, even when they were a bit cringey.

When I heard the cult classic was being adapted for the stage, reimagined for modern audiences and relocated to England, I was genuinely curious. Rebecca Reid’s script, directed by Gordon Greenberg and currently touring, makes significant changes to the source material; think less adaptation and more inspiration. Allie is now a divorced mother struggling with a tech start-up and the costs of her daughter Bella’s private school. When her ex-husband Sam slashes child maintenance payments, her best friend Graham encourages her to advertise for a lodger. Enter Hedy, who seems ideal until she begins insinuating herself into the household with a particularly sinister focus on fifteen-year-old Bella.

The story has been updated with social media, school bullying, and modern parenting anxieties, which makes sense on paper. But somewhere along the way, the production loses sight of what made the original story work. The film, for all its camp and pixie-bowl haircuts, was about one woman with no sense of self slowly becoming another woman she admired. That creeping metamorphosis was the horror. This version shifts the premise entirely: Hedy doesn’t want to be Allie. She wants to be Bella’s mother. These are fundamentally different stories, and the production never seems to notice this.

Morgan Large’s set is a single flat with a clever layout that places the kitchenette on one side, sofa in the middle, two pocket doors leading to bedrooms, and a sliding glass door with a balcony overlooking the London skyline. The staging itself is well thought out, but the trouble is that everything else about the flat lacks character. In a story focused on identity and becoming someone else, the space needed to centre us in Allie’s personality. Instead, it looked like a flat designed by a corporate hotel chain. They kept referring to it as run-down, but it didn’t look run-down. It looked soulless. Those aren’t the same thing. I believe the intent was to show that tower blocks in London are built to be utilitarian vessels, but the builders of high-rises don’t decorate your flat for you. 

To see my full review, please visit Northern Arts Review

See you in the shadows my loves,

Sean x