Review: High Noon

Billy Crudup and Denise Gough bring the Hollywood classic to the West End in a thrilling political Western

It’s an unhappy kind of feeling to find out just how perfectly High Noon suits 2026. First adapted by Carl Foreman in 1952 to become the quintessential Cold War Western, the classic Gary Cooper film arrived in the middle of the Hollywood blacklist era, telling a tale of defiance and opposition; of individuals and crowds; heroes and villains; spectators and bullies.

Premiering at the Harold Pinter Theatre the day after the shooting of Renee Nicole Good and a week after the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro, the new High Noon finds itself an old West allegory that hasn’t changed too much at all in 75 years. Tightened up and given extra teeth by Eric Roth (making his first jump to theatre after writing screen classics Forest Gump, Dune and Killers Of The Flower Moon), the story feels right at home on the stage – a sparce, lean, tense slice of political cowboy drama.

This is small town America in the 1800s, and Marshall Will Kane (Billy Crudup) has just married Quaker Amy Fowler (Denise Gough) when he gets the news that bad egg Frank Miller is arriving on the noon train, looking for trouble. Will the townsfolk help Kane make a stand, or will they talk and duck and hide and leave it to someone else?

Just as the film, the story is told in (sort of) real time, and a giant clock hanging above the stage starts ticking before the curtain even opens. There’s no interval here – the train will be here in 90 minutes so that’s as long as Will’s got to change people’s minds. It’s a doomed, fatalistic kind of plot device, and it works brilliantly. For all the cinematic scope of the original, this is where High Noon comes into focus even more sharply on stage – this is Waiting For Godot with guns. Greek tragedy with line-dancing and a few Springsteen numbers.

Denise Gough and Billy Crudup dance on stage in High Noon

Throwing in some modern musical hits (Ry Cooder and The Chicks also make the soundtrack), director Thea Sharrock cleverly dislocates High Noon even further from its setting. Closing a handsomely staged final shootout with ‘The Rising’, a song written about the aftermath of 9/11, the play feels out of time and place in exactly the right way – a universal drama about the wages of morality for 1880, 1952 or 2026.

As Kane, Crudup is quietly electric. Having a big year after generating record Oscar buzz for a single eight-minute scene in Jay Kelly, here he takes the leading role with the kind of understated reserve it deserves. Stepping into Gary Cooper’s boots can’t be easy, but Crudup’s Kane feels just as monolithic, and maybe more fragile. Gough, too, is brilliant – giving the role a desperate edge that was far too underwritten on screen.

Walking a fine line between political commentary and old-school thrills, High Noon pulls off the impossible. A classic big-sky western shouldn’t work on stage but here it feels like it makes even more sense as a parlour piece. A talky real-time period drama ought to jar with gunfights and modern musical numbers, but the balance pays off as something earned. Moreover, a story usually so locked into the climate of postwar Hollywood should feel quaint in today’s West End, but here, maybe sadly, it’s never felt more relevant.

High Noon is running at the Harold Pinter Theatre until 7 March. Find tickets here