Kind hearts are cold killers

From novel to film to stage play, `Kind Hearts and Coronets' has worn many hats. But, as David Benedict discovered, it's still as darkly stylish as ever

A relentless, remorseless comedy about a serial killer? Mary Whitehouse, Michael Medved and the moral majority would be up in arms if you tried it today. Hollywood could cope with the adultery, but six shameless cold- blooded killings and the suggestion that the murderer escapes detection? Donna Tartt's runaway bestseller and projected movie The Secret History has the same amoral air about it, but having done the deed (just the one) her characters are engulfed in guilt, which, as all good moralists will tell you, is as it should be.

The suggestion of a Hollywood remake of Kind Hearts and Coronets, a masterpiece of misanthropy, murder and millinery in which disinherited Edwardian counter- jumper Louis Mazzini of 73 Balaclava Avenue (Dennis Price) dispatches his nearest-and-not-so-dearest relatives (all played by Sir Alec Guinness) to assume a dukedom, is not so fanciful a notion as you might suppose. Thirteen years ago, Giles Croft, then artistic director of the Gate Theatre, sought the stage rights only to discover that they were already owned by Dustin Hoffman, who was probably in seventh heaven at the prospect of playing eight roles in one film. (Would this make him eligible for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor?) Cut to three years ago. Croft snaps up the newly reverted rights. Tonight, his adaptation opens at Watford's Palace Theatre where he is now artistic director.

The track record of recent screen-to-stage adaptations has been mixed, to say the least. For every Summer Holiday (which has already earned a pounds 3m profit before hitting the West End), there's a Les Enfants du Paradis. Mary Poppins and Doctor Dolittle are also waiting in the wings. A former literary manager of the National Theatre, Croft should know better than most about the rules of form and content. Isn't he tempting fate by messing with a masterpiece?

"I've always loved the film for its wit, its elegance and the extraordinarily good performances. There's no point in just putting the film on stage. Someone talking is more theatrical than cinematic. It's one bloke telling his story and that opens up the possibility of theatre - which is all about storytelling. If it works, I would argue that the alternatives we present are more interesting and challenging than the film, which is, to some degree, a prolonged exercise in style."

Some of Croft's alternatives relate to his use of the original source material. Robert Hamer's 1949 film was very loosely based on the 1907 novel Israel Rank by Roy Horniman, which had more than a whiff of Dorian Gray decadence about it. Hamer and his co-screenwriter John Dighton discarded most of the novel's self-conscious social criticism and attacks on the aristocracy, switched the central character from being half-Jewish to half-Italian, and finished up with the only screenplay to be written with a permanently raised eyebrow. Not a frame of Kind Hearts and Coronets has anything whatsoever to do with guilt - part of its positively delicious appeal - but the hero of the novel is haunted by it. "He has a significant battle with the demons about what he's doing which informs this adaptation. In the novel and the play, Louis is less inventive, less sophisticated. He makes mistakes. The film says something about the outside and class and the curiously British xenophobia, but the play seems to be about something more than the film allows you to see."

Croft's sense of the stymied intentions of the film-makers is borne out via a happy accident of casting. Simon Coury, who plays Louis on stage, is a cousin of Peter Tanner, who edited the film. Tanner, still working at Pinewood, remembers significant problems with the censor. "In the original script, Louis got away with it. But the censor decreed that he must pay for his crimes so the end was rewritten before shooting began. We then had to submit the finished film. The censor John Trevelyan, Hamer and I had a very good lunch at The Ivy to discuss it." All through lunch, Trevelyan refused to talk but had a sheet of paper with all his objections lying on the table. "I'd worked on secret documentaries as part of my war service and had learnt to read upside down, so by the time we came to it, I'd read all his notes. We didn't get away with everything though."

Capricious Sibella, the bewitching Joan Greenwood, her fluting voice pitched somewhere between a coo and a croak, and wearing ever more preposterous confections of veils and fruit salad on her head marries Lionel, "the most boring man in Europe", but spends the night before her wedding in Louis' arms. "We had a scene where Louis gives them their wedding present - a pair of antlers. The censor took that out... not that the majority would have understood the joke. The Americans made a lot more trims." Louis' first, somewhat lascivious victim dies with his latest girlfriend disappearing over a weir in a punt. "We hear him say, `I was sorry about the girl, but found some relief in the reflection that she had presumably, during the weekend, already undergone a fate worse than death." American sensibilities were apparently too sensitive for that sort of suggestion.

Theatre audiences are probably a hardier crew. But Croft's version will confound more than a few expectations. "What it won't be is a period drawing-room comedy. It's still funny, but at the centre it is very dark... the same story, but from the other end of the telescope." Bear in mind that this is the man who has commissioned Phyllis Nagy to adapt Patricia Highsmith's psychological thriller The Talented Mr Ripley. "I do enjoy a good murder story," he confesses

`Kind Hearts and Coronets' is at the Palace Theatre, Watford to 22 February. Booking: 01923 225671