Twice the fun for movie nerds but it won't bother the box office

JOHN LOGAN'S frustrating new play is a pub quiz film round mounted on stage. It awkwardly splices together Alfred Hitchcock's attempt to control and conquer Tippi Hedren during Marnie (1964) and Vincent Price's fraught relationship with the young, doomed director Michael Reeves on Witchfinder General (1968).

Logan has intelligent ideas about power dynamics between artists as well as image vs reality, and age vs celluloid immortality. But the characters are little more than stiff mouthpieces for these thoughts in Jonathan Kent's stilted production.

The gripping moments - when Reeves reveals his darkest fears, and Hedren has a #MeToo confrontation with Hitch are artificially engineered. For a play that's also about truth in art, it feels downright phony throughout, designed to make "the mob in the dark" (as Hitchcock calls audiences) feel smug when they decode an arcane movie reference.