Why is that man walking on the wall?

A film noir for the stage? Impossible, thought writer Nicholas Blincoe. Until he met the special effects department...

It began with a job offer. They wanted a screenplay for a contemporary thriller. It would be rooted in the American noir tradition, but filtered through a European sensibility. I saw Jean-Paul Belmondo in rimless shades, Alain Delon in a trench-coat and said, "Sign me up!" The one thing I did not understand: this would be a live performance, a piece of theatre. The two directors explained that they wanted to translate the language of cinema into a theatrical experience, drawing on everything that the theatre can offer, from lighting to choreography to flying from the ceiling on steel wires. Could I imagine it? I told them, frankly, no. But I knew I wanted to be a part of it.

At this first meeting, it was almost like the beginning of a film: a heist movie like Rififi or Oceans Eleven, where the guys with the plan have to assemble their team before the big job. The two directors, Kirsty Housley and Dan Hine had a track record in experimental theatre - Kirsty had turned Chris Morris's radio show Blue Jam into a piece of theatre - and they were aiming to win a new prize, the Oxford Samuel Beckett Trust Award, established to provide the money and the space for innovative drama. I think I was almost the last person to be recruited: they already had producers, a composer, designers and choreographers on board. I spoke eloquently about the original noir films, and the later French hommages. Twenty-four hours later, I was told I was in.

Film noir is like Noh theatre for film buffs, an entirely artificial genre that exists in its own parallel world. If I was feeling lairy, I might even argue that film noir is narrative cinema in its purest form, just as Noh theatre aspires to pure theatrical story-telling. The films have their tough guys, their dames, the guns and the clothes. The action emerges from shadows - despite the fact that its original milieu was LA, a city bathed in Mediterranean sunshine. The mean streets of Raymond Chandler were never supposed to be shot in sombre tones - that was the work of German émigré cinematographers brought up on stark, expressionist contrasts. It is something of a shock when a more naturalistic Chandler appears on screen, like Robert Altman's version of The Long Goodbye with its beaches and sunlight. As soon as any oxygen is allowed into the claustrophobic world of the crime thriller, it loses its power to shock and to seduce.

I came up with a story. A lonely hit man is asked to watch a woman and, on a given signal, kill her. The theme is voyeurism, straight out of Hitchcock, where the pleasure of looking is suffused with guilt and desire. As the film begins, the hit man is dreaming of escape. He has met a female doctor and begun to wonder if love can set him free. But as he watches this second woman, his target, he begins to fall for her. Another genre convention: the good woman and the femme fatale. As the story develops, the distance between these two archetypes becomes more fluid, more lost in the shadows. As I was writing the screenplay, I knew that the same actress would have to play both women, which again recalls Hitchcock, this time Vertigo and the part played by Kim Novak. In our live screenplay, the part will be played by Daniela Nardini, the kind of dream casting that makes a writer's mouth water.

The French, or European, motif comes through the hit man himself. The hit man is always a loner: like Alain Delon in Le Samourai, where he is explicitly compared to the wandering swordsmen of Kurosawa's films. Again and again, this loneliness is heightened by making the hit man a foreigner. In The Usual Suspects the killer has emerged from the chaos of the Balkans, a theme that the writer apparently borrowed from a 1940's adaptation of an Eric Ambler novel, A Coffin for Dimitrios. In more recent films, Jean Reno has played a French killer in America (Léon), Tim Roth a Russian-Jewish hit-man in Brooklyn (Little Odessa), and Forest Whitaker has played a black killer in a white Italian world (Ghost Dog). An idea that lies at the heart of all racism - foreigners are mysterious and evil - is taken up and looked at from a different angle in the hit man genre. My wife is Palestinian and, both here and in the States, she is regarded with suspicion but also attraction. So I was delighted when a young Egyptian actor was cast in the hit man role: Khalid Abdalla. And I was ecstatic when the composer Joe Townsend set the songs I had written to hip-hop beats tinged with the music of the Middle Eastern torch singers Fairuz and Oum Kalthoum (songs are important to film noir, as Casablanca or Pépé le Moko prove).

As my hit man steps out of the shadows, and into the lives of the two women, he begins to lose the control that he had as a lone killer. Much of the action takes place in a casino, recalling the Clermont Club of the days of John Aspinall, Lord Lucan and James Goldsmith. An American film would introduce gangsters here, but I wanted English aristo or arriviste bully-boys. The hit man's failure to understand the jealousies and the intrigues of their world brings about his downfall.

I had a very clear idea of what my screenplay would look like as a film. I had no idea what it would look like as a play. But then I was given tickets to see a performance by the choreographer, Amit Lahav, and I had a moment of revelation. The piece, named Taylor's Dummies, used the kind of wire-work one sees in kung-fu movies to play tricks of perspective on the audience. A woman walks across the stage, but across the wall rather than the floor. A man sits at a table and asks for a drink, but he is sticking out from the back wall and though we are peering upwards, the angle suggests that we are actually looking down from a balcony. I finally understood how a film could be a play. The ruthless manipulation of our viewpoint, that we take for granted in the cinema, would be exposed in this theatrical production. The strangeness of film noir would be intensified, by drawing attention to facets of the camerawork that are now so familiar we are immune to them.

Then I found out that the lighting scheme would be designed by the cinematographer Brian Tufano, the man who lit Trainspotting and Shallow Grave, as well as the first "X" film I ever saw, Quadrophenia. And now it made perfect sense.

'Cue Deadly': Riverside Studios, London W6 (020 8237 1111), 17 Nov to 6 Dec