Hitchcock Blonde, Royal Court Theatre, London

A distinctly underwhelming obsession

Terry Johnson made a small fortune from his stage adaptation of The Graduate, with its promise of a blonde star glimpsed in the altogether. A taste for naked light-haired actresses makes a more pervasive appearance in Johnson's new play, premiered in his own hi-tech production. As the title denotes, the über-fancier of unclothed bottle-blondes here is the great film director Alfred Hitchcock.

The play plaits together three time strands. In the 1999 scenes, we are swept to a Greek-island villa where Alex (David Haig), an earnest, emotionally disingenuous media-studies don, and Nicola (Fiona Glascott), a blonde (natch) female student, are working on what could be a major find. A cache of damaged 80-year-old celluloid may be a disturbed first stab (so to speak) at Psycho. Interwoven with this is a series of unsettling encounters 40 years earlier between the significantly nameless Blonde who was Janet Leigh's body double for the shower scenes in the 1960 classic, and the director himself. The third thread is the vestigial 1919 movie, with its bath scene and other footage that may explain Hitch's voyeuristic obsession with persecuted peroxide creatures.

There are a few sequences where the show exerts the requisite fascination. William Hootkins delivers a darkly hilarious impersonation of the director – at once a huge, bloated baby with despotic primal desires, and a fastidious epicure who can only function if he places a movie camera between himself and his infatuations. Rosamund Pike is both stunningly beautiful and a haunting mix of the desperate and the determined as the Blonde, who attempts to call Hitchcock's bluff – only to find him slump in a near-seizure when she makes him fondle a bare breast.

It is, however, a long and involved evening. For a start, the contemporary relationship strains credulity and it drags because of the verbose, self-indulgent writing and the trumped-up characterisation of Nicola. For the purposes of plot and theme, she somehow has to be a damaged yet lippy, culturally ignorant yet brilliant student who ends up taking a knife to... ah, but that would be telling.

Nothing here dissuades you from the view that this would work better on screen. The fiddly technical business with the discovered celluloid looks ludicrous when we can't see what's going on. The stills and the footage from 1919 look damagingly fake. And despite allusions to several Hitchcock movies and the overripe Bernard Herrmann soundtrack music, theatre – as deployed here – cannot find a telling equivalent for the ogling complicity forced on you by film.

Moreover, the contrasts and overlaps between the three periods and sets of sexual relationships are not exactly startling. You wait for the predictable twist whereby cinephile Alex becomes a distorted mirror of Hitchcock, retreating from a carnal closeness with his student into an obsession with the old movie. Et cetera. And the final revelations are distinctly underwhelming. This is an ambitious project, but not a patch on Johnson's greatest hits.

To 24 May (020-7565 5000)