Billy Crudup & Denise Gough On Creating ‘High Noon’ For London Stage

EXCLUSIVE: The clock is ticking as Billy Crudup ( The Morning Show ) and Denise Gough ( Andor ) run a scene from Oscar-winning writer Eric Roth ’s stage adaptation of High Noon , director Fred Zinnemann’s classic movie Western released at the height of McCarthyism and the Red Scare.

Mood boards adorn the walls of the rehearsal hall in Clerkenwell, London, with images of Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly — who played the key roles of just-retired Marshal Will Kane and his newlywed bride Amy Fowler in the 1952 film scripted by Carl Foreman — plus faded portraits of real-life 1870s frontier folk and blueprints of Tim Hatley’s design’s for the play’s fictional New Mexico Territory town of Hadleyville, where bad men are headed on the noon train out for vengeance and Kane is their tar