The Talented Mr. Ripley Festival Theatre Edinburgh 16th September 2025 Review
The Talented Mr. Ripley is at The Festival Theatre Edinburgh this week (16-20 September) and if you like your dramas to have more than a plot twist or two, then this is probably a show for you. Many people will probably be already familiar with Patricia Highsmith’s now iconic Mr Ripley through her five books featuring the character, but also the film adaptations that there have been of them over the years, including the 1999 film “The Talented Mr Ripley” starring Matt Damon.
I am, however, one of those people who have never read the books or seen any of the films, so this review is based entirely upon the Mr Ripley in this stage production. If, like me, you are reading this review and also do not know much, or anything, about Mr Ripley, then I am deliberately keeping the plot to this story vague so as not to give away any surprises.
This was, without doubt, a complex work to adapt to the stage, and some major decisions as to exactly what was going to survive the transition from book to theatre audiences had to be made very early in the production stages.
One obvious factor here is the stage set itself. When you have a story that potentially requires many different scenes you only have a few choices – spend a huge amount of money on sets, or ignore the visual scenes completely and find other ways to indicate to people where the scene is taking place. Here that choice was the latter, and this set is essentially a very minimalist raised performance cuboid with a hole in the middle of it.
All stage sets like this though have an inherent problem, and that is that, for anyone in the audience, your view of what is happening on stage depends on where you are sitting, and whilst the balcony view of this stage tonight was excellent, I suspect that many seats in the stalls and sides of the theatre (or both) had a restricted line of sight to the stage. Sadly, the practicality of designing a stage set that gives perfect views for everyone in a theatre is often not a realisable goal to achieve and compromises always have to be made. There were times, for me, when some of the people moving on or around the stage did break up the narrative flow a little, but Holly Pigott, set and costume designer, made the right choice in taking a very minimalist approach to this production.
“The Talented Mr Ripley” is a heavily scripted work. Everything here is in the dialogue and a vast amount of that dialogue is from Mr Ripley himself. Here the dialogue is not only that spoken by Ripley to other characters, but also what is going on in his own mind and often it is his inner thoughts that feel as if they are being spoken directly to an audience. This is a show where, as an audience member, you have to be prepared to listen closely to every spoken word and to completely enter into the story line in your own mind’s eye too.
To be able to communicate all of this effectively, you need a performer who not only has those performance skills, but also one who can do it, as required here, with a blank canvas of no visual or physical conventional stage set to work in, and Ed McVey as Tom Ripley was impressive in this role tonight. There have to be, I hope, more than a few awards out there with Ed McVey’s name on them for his role as Tom Ripley in this production. Here Ed McVey does exactly what Patricia Highsmith set out to do in her books, and that is somehow make people become interested and even like a deeply unpleasant character.
The Festival Theatre is a large performance space, but still this thriller worked in it. It would be interesting though to see this production performed in a smaller and more intimate space where an audience is far closer to Mr Ripley and his often personal inner thoughts.
For all of this to work on stage, good support characters have to be in place, and here Bruce Herbelin-Earle (Dickie Greenleaf), Maisie Smith (Marge Sherwood) and Christopher Bianchi (Herbert Greenleaf/Roverini) were always there with performances that allowed Ed McVey to make the most of his role as Tom Ripley.
Review by Tom King (c0 2025
www.artsreviewsedinburgh.com
I am, however, one of those people who have never read the books or seen any of the films, so this review is based entirely upon the Mr Ripley in this stage production. If, like me, you are reading this review and also do not know much, or anything, about Mr Ripley, then I am deliberately keeping the plot to this story vague so as not to give away any surprises.
This was, without doubt, a complex work to adapt to the stage, and some major decisions as to exactly what was going to survive the transition from book to theatre audiences had to be made very early in the production stages.
One obvious factor here is the stage set itself. When you have a story that potentially requires many different scenes you only have a few choices – spend a huge amount of money on sets, or ignore the visual scenes completely and find other ways to indicate to people where the scene is taking place. Here that choice was the latter, and this set is essentially a very minimalist raised performance cuboid with a hole in the middle of it.
All stage sets like this though have an inherent problem, and that is that, for anyone in the audience, your view of what is happening on stage depends on where you are sitting, and whilst the balcony view of this stage tonight was excellent, I suspect that many seats in the stalls and sides of the theatre (or both) had a restricted line of sight to the stage. Sadly, the practicality of designing a stage set that gives perfect views for everyone in a theatre is often not a realisable goal to achieve and compromises always have to be made. There were times, for me, when some of the people moving on or around the stage did break up the narrative flow a little, but Holly Pigott, set and costume designer, made the right choice in taking a very minimalist approach to this production.
“The Talented Mr Ripley” is a heavily scripted work. Everything here is in the dialogue and a vast amount of that dialogue is from Mr Ripley himself. Here the dialogue is not only that spoken by Ripley to other characters, but also what is going on in his own mind and often it is his inner thoughts that feel as if they are being spoken directly to an audience. This is a show where, as an audience member, you have to be prepared to listen closely to every spoken word and to completely enter into the story line in your own mind’s eye too.
To be able to communicate all of this effectively, you need a performer who not only has those performance skills, but also one who can do it, as required here, with a blank canvas of no visual or physical conventional stage set to work in, and Ed McVey as Tom Ripley was impressive in this role tonight. There have to be, I hope, more than a few awards out there with Ed McVey’s name on them for his role as Tom Ripley in this production. Here Ed McVey does exactly what Patricia Highsmith set out to do in her books, and that is somehow make people become interested and even like a deeply unpleasant character.
The Festival Theatre is a large performance space, but still this thriller worked in it. It would be interesting though to see this production performed in a smaller and more intimate space where an audience is far closer to Mr Ripley and his often personal inner thoughts.
For all of this to work on stage, good support characters have to be in place, and here Bruce Herbelin-Earle (Dickie Greenleaf), Maisie Smith (Marge Sherwood) and Christopher Bianchi (Herbert Greenleaf/Roverini) were always there with performances that allowed Ed McVey to make the most of his role as Tom Ripley.
Review by Tom King (c0 2025
www.artsreviewsedinburgh.com