York Theatre Royal
Fun, intelligent and powered by Rice’s joyful whimsy, this playful take on the spy movie is a crowd-pleaser

Mistaken identity fires Alfred Hitchcock’s Kafkaesque 1959 spy thriller. The existential terror of a man under attack by unknown forces begins when New York ad-man Roger Thornhill stands up to make a phone call in a hotel lobby and is mistaken for George Kaplan, a nonexistent spy created as a decoy by the US’s cold war-era security services. From thereon in he is pursued by enemies of the state. If everyone insists Roger is George, where does that leave his sense of self?

Emma Rice’s adaptation is not concerned with the crisis around identity but with sending up the espionage genre through an archly played collection of spies and villains.