ANYONE who remembers Alfred Hitchcock’s enthralling and dramatic Cold War era thriller, North by North West, with its terrifying scene of the hero being pursued by a crop-duster plane, will want to see how the ever-inventive Emma Rice has adapted the 1950s film for the stage. Find out when her Wise Children company comes, all the way from its home in Frome, to Bath Theatre Royal from Tuesday 27th to Saturday 31st May, as part of a national tour that ends in London’s atmospheric Alexandra Palace.

It would be strange, would it not, if, in a city of seven million people, one man were never mistaken for another … But that is exactly what happens to Roger Thornhill, reluctant hero of North by Northwest, when a mistimed phone call to his mother lands him smack bang in the middle of a Cold War conspiracy. Now he’s on the run, dodging spies, airplanes and a femme fatale who might not be all she seems.

Photograph (of the remarkable and ever-watchable Katy Owen) by Steve Tanner