Hats. Lots of hats. Emma Rice’s stage adaptation of the classic Alfred Hitchcock thriller North by Northwest - which opens at York Theatre Royal from March 18-April 5 - features a multitude of hats worn by the six performers as they assume multiple characters.
Luckily Ewan Wardrop - who plays reluctant hero Roger Thornhill, the character Cary Grant made famous in the 1959 movie - is used to wearing many different hats in his professional life as an actor, dancer and multi-instrumentalist.
Ewan started out as a ballet dancer, and at 21 found himself appearing on Broadway for six months as one of the swans in Matthew Bourne’s all-male reworking of Swan Lake. During the run he played both The Swan and the Prince.
“It was incredible, though I think I was too young to appreciate it," he recalls. "I was living in Greenwich Village and walking up Broadway to work...” A procession of American celebrities – Barbra Streisand is a conversational "for instance" - found their way into the dressing rooms, post-show. Now he’s following in the cinematic footsteps of another Hollywood icon, Cary Grant.
Ewan has worked with adapter and director Emma Rice before. His roles for her have included Bottom in A Midsummer Nights Dream at Shakespeare’s Globe in London and most recently in her production of The Buddha of Suburbia for the Royal Shakespeare Company. He’s confident that, with her history of adapting films, she’ll put her stamp on the material. Rehearsal video shows scenes involving a lot of movement and even dance, for example.
“One of her big strengths is knowing how people operate and pressing the right buttons,” he says, adding: “she knows me better than I do, sometimes.”
Ewan didn’t worry about seeing Grant in the movie before rehearsals began. “Some actors don’t want to see someone else playing their role because they worry they’ll be influenced by the other person. I’m not like that,” he says.
“He’s a reluctant hero in a classic Hitchcock situation; an advertising executive who leads quite a shallow existence. He’s a bit of a ladies' man, going through something of a charmed life.
"Things sort of just happen to him. He’s confused, but gradually works out what’s going on. He falls into this whole world of espionage and politics and becomes this James Bond type of character.
“I always try to bring as much of myself to a part as possible; Cary Grant had huge charisma, but you can bring things of yourself to a role.”
A Hitchcock thriller is a world away from the ballet world in which Ewan began performing as a child.
There was a well-regarded ballet school in the area of Devon in which his family lived, and after accompanying his sister to her ballet classes he “became quite good at it” himself. Dancing in Swan Lake and as a principal dancer with Bourne’s company in the West End, on Broadway and around the world led to a move to broaden his talent into acting and physical theatre, as well as becoming a multi-instrumentalist.
One of his instruments is the... ukulele. A fellow actor heard him playing in the dressing room when they were in a West End show and that led to an Edinburgh Fringe Festival show, followed by a tour in which he played comedy actor and ukulele maestro, George Formby.
As for the future, Ewan admits he’s "not terribly ambitious", explaining: “I don’t look towards movies or that sort of thing. I like working with people I like, doing good interesting work. As long as that keeps coming, I’m happy.”
More info and tickets here