The double life of a film noir

Double Indemnity is making a comeback - as a stage adaptation in Nottingham

Isn't Giles Croft, the artistic director of the Nottingham Playhouse, rather reckless in staging Double Indemnity? Pauline Kael called the 1944 film of the same name "a shrewd, smoothly tawdry thriller", and said that Barbara Stanwyck, as the peroxide-blonde tramp who seduces Walter, an insurance salesman, into murdering her husband, only to be found out by investigator Edward G Robinson, helped to make it one of the high points of its decade. Is Croft creating another When Harry Met Sally-style adaptation that is bound to disappoint fans of the movie?

Not at all, says Croft, who points out that David Joss Buckley's play isn't based on it. "He's gone back to the James M Cain novel of 1936. The film's screenwriter, Raymond Chandler, and its director, Billy Wilder, changed the plot slightly, and, more importantly, they changed the style and the treatment of the characters. In the movie, Phyllis and Walter are like lovers; in the book, they're more like mother and son. Chandler and Wilder also brought their wit and sophistication to the story, which Cain wrote in a very rough-hewn way." Those who have seen the movie may also notice that the characters don't have the same names. In the film, the slutty siren is called Phyllis Dietrichson, a name that suggests a Marlene knock-off; in the hard-boiled and rigorously unglamorous novel, she's called Nird- linger, a name that is not merely ordinary but anaphrodisiac.

In the Forties, Croft says, the Hollywood film (seen from Walter's point of view) had to make Phyllis seem thoroughly evil. "In Buckley's version there are different narrators, so we get different points of view." He laughs. "I'm not saying it's Rashomon, but we can build up levels of interpretation."

The dialogue's harshness will be softened by a poetic staging. "We're not creating a naturalistic feel. Mark Bailey's design will allow us to project images onto screens; Matthew Bugg's score includes Forties- era music, but also the sounds of walking and breathing - not so much music as texture."

Croft, who has adapted the Ealing favourites The Ladykillers, Kind Hearts and Coronets and Passport to Pimlico for the stage, isn't bothered about the increasing number of plays that are derived from popular films. "I don't think the source of the material matters - even Shakespeare got his stories from someone else."

Hywel Simons, as Walter, has an easier role than Lucy Cohu, who will have to be credible as an American femme fatale and a down-at-heel Depression-era dame, a part in which Stanwyck succeeded despite an almost risible ferocity and extravagant coiffure. In substituting grit for glamour, Croft says, there are aspects of the movie he wondered about including, but on one point there was no hesitation: "I never thought of trying to copy Stanwyck's hair."

'Double Indemnity', Nottingham Playhouse (0115-941 9419) 12 March to 3 April