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by Frederick Knott, adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher, directed by Sanjay Talwar

Shaw Festival, Festival Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake

July 5-October 5, 2025

Mike: “This is the big bad world, full of mean people, where nasty things happen!”

The Shaw Festival’s current production of Wait Until Dark is a curious example of a thriller that doesn’t thrill. What might have exciting and innovative in 1965 when Frederick Knott’s play premiered now seems not only tame but tedious. Jeffrey Hatcher’s 2013 adaptation, for which Hatcher claims to have added “a few more dramatic surprises”, seems to have done little to alleviate the tedium. When the well-known 1967 film starring Audrey Hepburn and Alan Arkin came out, Time Magazine said the film was superior to the stage version. After seeing the present Shaw production, one would have to agree.

Knott’s original play was set in 1966 in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Hatcher’s adaptation relocates the action to 1944 in Greenwich Village. His rationale was to make Knott’s somewhat dated language sound more in place, to evoke the mood of film noir and to give the male characters who experienced World War II more motivation for their actions. That is all very well, but it does not change the play’s structure which is it main problem.

The play opens with an unknown man murdering an unknown woman in a basement apartment and shoving her body into a closet. The next scene finds the same man, Harry Roat, explaining to Carlino, a fellow criminal, what his plan is. Knott gives Roat an extremely long expository speech in which Roat includes so many details about events that happened before the onstage action it is more likely to confuse rather than enlighten. The film obviates the need for this long narration by depicting all the events Roat describes.

The main point is that a doll containing something so valuable that people will kill for it has fallen into the hands of the photographer Sam Hendrix. Roat has searched Sam’s basement apartment and found nothing. His conclusion is that the doll must be in the apartment’s safe. After the criminals have finished planning, Sam’s wife Susan enters and we note that she is blind. As we discover, Susan has been blind for only a year following a car accident and is still trying to accommodate herself to her new life. Gloria, a young girl from the apartment upstairs, is meant to help her but is rather more of a nuisance.

While Sam is away at his studio, Carlino visits Susan claiming to be a policeman who is investigating the death of a woman whose body has been found nearby. His series of chats with Susan, since he keeps returning, give him further chances to search for the doll and find out whether Susan or Sam knows where the doll is. Susan says she knows nothing about a doll and that she and Sam have never used the safe, a remnant left from a previous tenant.

After Carlino’s first visit Mike Tilman, a man in uniform about Sam’s age, shows up. He says he is an old pal of Sam’s from their days in the Marines and is just dropping by while he is on leave. Altogether five strangers drop by the Hendrix apartment in just one day which ought to arouse suspicions in Susan far earlier than it does.

As it turns out none of this going and coming really matters. The sought-after doll is what Alfred Hitchcock called a “MacGuffin”, i.e., an object that is necessary to the plot but irrelevant to the story’s resolution. The entire point of the action is to set up the play’s last 15 minutes in which Susan fends off an attack by the murderous Roat. The idea is to demonstrate that someone people might regard as a helpless, blind woman can outwit and defeat a stronger, sighted man. Susan does this by unscrewing the fuses for all the lights in the flat so that Roat has to fight her in complete darkness, a situation where she has the advantage.

To spend an hour and 45 minutes setting up this confrontation is what they call a long run for a short slide. For all the time preceding the fight we hear dialogue amounting to “Is the doll in the safe?” “No, the doll is not in the safe,” “Where is it then?” and “I don’t know” repeated ad nauseam since the villains in the play can’t seem to rid themselves of their idée fixe concerning the doll’s whereabouts. Similarly, other characters refer to Susan as blind and Susan herself calls herself blind so often we wonder whether the playwright thinks we’re so dense he has to hammer the idea in.

The pace of the action is not so quick that we ignore the play’s many plot holes. How exactly did Roat and the soon-to-be murdered woman get into the Hendrix’s flat when they we out. Do people in Greenwich Village not lock their doors? When she finds that the phone line has been cut, why does Susan send Gloria to meet Sam at the train station instead of sending her directly to the police? The answer is that if Gloria fetched the police, Knott would not be able to have the final scene he wants.

Given that this final scene is so important, it is a pity that on stage it is so poorly choreographed. Of course, the stage cannot be plunged into complete blackness as is supposed to be the case. Even so simply from the confused rolling around of bodies on stage, then off stage then on stage again, it is impossible to tell what exactly is happening or who has the advantage one moment and who the next. This means that the scene that is meant to arouse the most tension only arouses bewilderment. Even when the fight is over, Knott’s strategy of artificially delaying the identity of the survivor is just a trick to surprise the audience.

Designing the play must be a thankless task since there is little chance to vary where items of the Hendrix’s combined kitchen/living room/studio can be. As a result, Lorenzo Savoini has created a typical Broadway-style set, very different in look from his other work. Why he has made the Hendrix’s flat look so shabby is a mystery. The Hendrixes may not be rich but they are not down and out. Ming Wong’s costumes indicate that the couple are getting by pretty well.

Directing the play must also be a challenge since the language is so pedestrian and the blocking cannot stray far from what Knott has already spelled out in his stage directions. Where director Sanjay Talwar succeeds is in encouraging the cast to take the few opportunities they have to give their two-dimensional characters some depth.

As Susan, Sochi Fried has the central role and the greatest number of chances to show different sides to her characters. Having known people who are legally blind, I can say that Fried does an excellent job in realistically portraying how blind people move through rooms and go about everyday tasks. This completely unclichéd performance is probably the greatest achievement of the show. Fried’s face and voice are wonderfully expressive of emotions from irony to irritation, fear and resolve. Best of all, Freid subtly signals to the audience when Susan has an insight or senses something is wrong.

No other character is this detailed. Martin Happer plays Carlino as a gruff, no-nonsense policeman, but his only chance to do show some other aspect of the characters is the short burst of comedy when he rushes about the apartment trying to wipe off all the fingerprints he has left.

Kristopher Bowman plays Mike Talman as such an altogether nice, helpful guy that it is hard to believe he works for Roat. In fact, the best part of Bowan’s performance is how he shows that Mike’s resolve to continuing deceiving Susan begins to fade the more he gets to know her.

J.J. Gerber plays Susan’s husband Sam. We are meant to think of Sam as a kind, loving husband but, as written, Sam’s attempts to help Susan cope with blindness, like having her play fetch, are cringeworthy. Knott makes it impossible for an actor to link hese two sides of Sam.

Eponine Lee’s Gloria is the only character who is primarily a comic figure. Lee plays Gloria mostly as an annoying brat to begin with who gradually becomes Susan’s enthusiastic helper once Gloria realizes that what Susan wants her to do is secret and dangerous.

While Fried, who is fully-sighted plays a blind character, Bruce Horak, who lost 90% of his vision to cancer, plays the fully-sighted villain Henry Roat. As an actor Horak displays his versatility by playing a character who also pretends to be two other characters. As Roat he plays as a typically harsh-voiced 1940s villain with a taste for brutality. Roat visits Susan once disguised as a crazy old man and again as the old man’s distraught son before appearing to Susan in his own person. Since Susan is blind, it’s clear that these disguises are meant to fool the audience, not Susan. Nevertheless, Horak’s change of voice and demeanour is so great as the young man that initially I did not think it was Roat in disguise.

In the past the Shaw Festival has managed to dust off wonderfully engaging old mysteries and thrillers for our entertainment. Wait Until Dark is not one of these. Film, with its techniques of close-ups, cutting and camera angles can make a fight scene more exciting than theatre can by having two characters roll about in a dimly lit stage while we sit gazing on at a fixed distance. Scenes of supposedly weak women triumphing over supposedly strong men have become such a commonplace in film and television in the sixty years since the play that not even Susan’s blindness makes it feel new. Though the entire Shaw cast do their very best, there really is no doubt that the 1967 film has superseded the 1965 play making one feel that a lot of time and talent could have better been spent on a worthier play.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Sochi Fried as Susan and Kristopher Bowman as Mike; Bruce Horak as Roat and Martin Happer as Carlino; Sochi Fried as Susan; Eponine Lee as Gloria. © 2025 David Cooper.

For tickets visit: www.shawfest.com.