High Noon play review: New ground for the West End’s Westerns
High Noon review and star rating: ★★
Westerns feel ripe for the stage, although very few have been staged as plays. The musicals are famous West End fodder: Oklahoma! was given a provocative, horny reimagining at the Young Vic in 2022, but while High Noon has some musical numbers courtesy of Bruce Springsteen’s back catalogue, the idea here is to play with silence and shadow: can the tension of one of the most classic ever Westerns, the 1952 movie High Noon starring Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly, be conjured on stage?
Adapted for the West End by screenwriting legend Eric Roth of Dune and Forrest Gump and directed by Thea Sharrock, this star vehicle feels more like a litmus test for what could be achieved than a polished example of the genre transferring to new ground.
There is at least atmosphere: Tim Hatley’s cosy, ominous set epitomises the Western in the mind’s eye. There are plenty of claustrophobic bars with those wooden doors that clap shut. On this stylistic level, High Noon delivers: on a few occasions there are shoot-outs and confrontations that feel loaded with threat.
We follow Marshall Will Kane who has become newly married to local girl Amy Fowler. It is the eve of their wedding and they are about to leave their small American town to start a new life when Marshall discovers an old enemy and a local criminal is returning to town. His sense of honour makes him feel compelled to face off with him one final time, delaying his departure. Fowler is a Mormon and has a strict belief that guns and violence are wrong and vows not to support him.
Denise Gough’s tortured, impassioned Amy Fowler grips with presentations of anguish. When she says she must stand by her belief at all costs, you believe her. Billy Crudup is fine if less compelling at the cold and moralistic but underwritten town marshall. Despite the talk about High Noon being a drama, there are musical and line dancing numbers. They often feel incongruous with the tone, although Gough, who gets many of the ballads, is an impressive singer.
So far, so good, until much of the central conceit is undermined by the flawed and dated vision of Amy Fowler, who you properly buy into in the first half of the story (there is just one act) but who is ultimately thrust into a position that betrays her character’s DNA. The writing at its core feels fairly sexist in that it reduces her passions to fodder by the end, and there is a disappointing pay off. High Noon is a dated story, but if nothing else, this show makes you ponder why more straight Westerns haven’t made it to the stage.
High Noon plays at the Harold Pinter Theatre until March 6, 2026.