Patricia Highsmith is one of those authors who can’t help but fascinate you. Not only was she the brilliant and eccentric author ofThe Talented Mr. Ripley, she was also renowned for being the embodiment of many of her morally ambiguous antiheroes.
The Sydney Theatre Company is continuing Highsmith’s legacy of suspense with its latest thriller, Switzerland. This fictional postulation will pit a young man (Eamon Farren) up against Highsmith (Sarah Peirse) with unexpected consequences. As Farren explains, a business trip quickly turns into a game of cat and mouse worthy of Tom Ripley himself.
“It starts off with a young guy turning up to Patricia Highsmith’s home in Switzerland with the intention of getting her to sign a contract to commit to writing the final Ripley novel,” Farren says. “We find out during the first act that the company he works for sent another poor young chap to do the same thing, but it ended terribly.
“The unravelling of it, and how it turns into a cat and mouse game, is that Patricia Highsmith isn’t going to let the company pull one over on her. She tries to play a game, test his mettle, and see how far he’ll go to get the contract signed,” laughs Farren.
The concept of fictionalising a real person can be morally ambiguous. However, considering the subject matter that Highsmith wrote about, and that most of her protagonists were antiheroes, one could argue it’s a perfect fit.
“I think that’s what the playwright, Joanna Murray-Smith, has managed to do really well,” says Farren. “Highsmith is one of the great masters of literature that nobody really knows about. That is a great opportunity to explore why we don’t know about her and what it is about her she didn’t want people to know. What was in her that made her so elusive and unattainable?
“It also lends a lot to her kind of writing. She was an enigma. When you research her, you find out that she was a very complicated woman who had a lot of conflict within her life as well as the way she viewed literature and art,” Farren continues. “There’s something alluring about a great artist who shuns the limelight but simultaneously craves it. I think that her work reflects that. She was a great lover of not delineating between what it is to kill and depicting murderers as normal people. She was so interested in what it takes for someone to kill and how they got to that point.”
In addition to theRipliad, Farren also mentions how Highsmith’s Strangers On A Train depicts these ideas. “It’s such an amazing study of how two people can get to the point of murder out of necessity and what it does to them.”
Due to the fact that Highsmith was such a mystery, it begs the question of how she is portrayed in Switzerland.
“It’s very easy to get obsessed with who she was, because she was so complicated,” says Farren. “The great theatrical device that’s used in this is that we have a young American optimist who comes to her with the ideas of her public persona and reputation. She was known as a bolshie, hard woman but was also famous for being one of the most amazing people in a room. Her ability to story-tell in both her writing and in person was renowned. You’ll get to see what happens when you meet someone with such an amazing and hard social persona and what the reality is. It’s where the truth meets the lies.”
Switzerlandis playing at theDrama Theatre, Sydney Opera House fromMonday November 3 to Saturday December 20, tickets and times available online.
