As a Ripley fanboy, I was keen to see how Aussie playwright Joanna Murray-Smith would interpret my favourite serial killer, so on the second-last day of the Sydney season I joined family at the Roslyn Packer Theatre to check it out.
Before I explain my furious response, a bit of context.
When I say Ripley fanboy, I’ve read the complete Ripliad and have forensically digested the famous first-volume several times. I am also a devotee of Patricia Highsmith’s writings, not just her fiction, and I know from her diaries what she had in mind when she created young Tom.
HE’S NOT GAY!
Tom Ripley is asexual.
He understands and uses sexuality in the same way a psychopath understands and uses empathy despite having none. ‘The Talented Mr Ripley‘ (1955) was a case study of the ‘dark triad’ psychological traits fifty years before that term was even coined.
It’s THAT genius.
Which is why Joanna Murray-Smith’s campy Tom left me in a seething fury:
What a cop-out!
What shameful laziness!
But also: Why do the Alphabet People have to steal everything? At dinner afterwards, I even had to have a second Cooper’s Light to calm myself down!
When I explained my emotional reaction to the rest of the family (around Turkish titbits at Anason in Barangaroo) they just shrugged — artistic license, you know, the director’s vision, blahdy-blah.
I disagree.
It’s the thin end of the wedge.
I mean, what next? Was Jack Aubrey also a homosexual man? Those musketeers were camp as a row of tents! I’ve always had my doubts about Mr Darcy. And you can tell by that moustache why Poirot never married Ms Lemon.
Polite but firm note to all directors: gay is not a synonym for interesting.
Making everyone gay just proves society is spiralling into virtue-signalling madness. Even worse, Ripley’s motive for murder falsely becomes gay rage — unrequited lust is why Tom oars Dickie to death?!
Nah bro.
Patricia Highsmith’s antihero Tom Ripley, asexual psychopath, is so complex that she never stopped writing about him, and we never stopped reading him.
But he’s interesting because he’s not-gay.