Blurred vision

All About Eve is Cinderella steeped in acid rather than sugar. Eve, or Cinders, is a wannabe star who uses a powerful theatre critic (the Buttons character) to help her win fame by overcoming two Ugly Sisters represented by a movie goddess, Margo Channing, and her film-director boyfriend. This fairytale was filmed in 1950 with Bette Davis as Margo and it remains a widely loved classic. Ivo van Hove’s version is torn between the 1950s and the present day. Result: a mystery.

Margo is clearly being stalked by Eve but instead of referring the poor girl to a psychiatrist, she hires her as an understudy. Somewhat rash! Margo seems oddly dependent on her looks for work. She never considers directing or producing her own scripts, and she regards television as a loser’s graveyard. And yet, even more curiously, the play is presented like a reality TV show being recorded in a studio. Van Hove uses two Steadicams to film the action backstage, which is then beamed to the audience on a vast screen over the playing area.

This dual approach seems amateurishly naive. The main performers are shrunk to tiny chess pieces while big close-ups of other cast members render their attempts to act irrelevant. Compounding the muddle, there are two rehearsal spaces in view where random characters mooch and stray. What a mess. Had I financed this show, I’d have asked Van Hove to start again and make it intelligible. His blunder is easy to spot: by asking the audience to study several areas of the stage at once he sabotages their interest altogether.

The starry cast is led by Gillian Anderson whose remote, statuesque beauty makes her an ideal Margo. And she invests this cheerless, prickly character with all the stone-dead hauteur she can muster.