Newsnight Review discussed Terry Johnson's new play, Hitchcock Blonde.

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(Edited highlights of the panel's review)

MARK LAWSON: Hitchcock, the title character knew how to hold an audience to build suspense. Has Terry Johnson managed it?

JAMES PATTERSON: There are a lot of interesting pieces. We've got mystery and film history and frontal nudity and romance. They just didn't for me come together into anything that sustained as much as I would have liked it to. I think one of the reasons I didn't care about the characters very much other than Hitchcock himself. That character I wanted to know. I didn't find out, but what makes him tick and the others characters didn't add up.

MARK LAWSON: We had tabloid photographers being thrown out of the stalls. There are three time periods, 1919, 1959 and 1999. Did the structure work?

TOM PAULIN: No it was boring and tedious in the theatre. It was about the humiliation of women . The females were humiliated. It was written for male film buffs. The talk about sex was ridiculous. The characterisation of the women awful. Fiona comes across terrific at the beginning and then she is made into a kind of a Lady Di figure, even more so Rosamunde Pike and I think he's fascinated with Prince Charles. Okay, men are a mess but look at women, they are emotionally crazy and into self-harm and worse, they will harm us men and might stab us. The obsession with the shower scene in Psycho, which you get in that seedy film Shortcuts, there is something really horrible here and it was naff.

MARK LAWSON: It is complicated in the way the women are treated but because he does this plot twice, he seems to be trying to say something about how men are manipulative and women are needy and they are used by then.

JEANETTE WINTERSON: Yes. The scenes between Alex and Nicola are much less well written and convincing than are the ones between the blonde and Hitchcock. I found when the woman is asked to take off her clothes and then she is terrified and then is excited and eventually has an orgasm the audience were silent.

TOM PAULIN: It was disgraceful. I think this is a man writing and I thought it was banal and male fantasy of the worst kind.

MARK LAWSON: He's very hard on the male characters.

TOM PAULIN: Not really.

MARK LAWSON: He clearly explores the sexual creepiness.

TOM PAULIN: You get a look-a-like Hitchcock talking in this way. It is revolting and it is awful.

JAMES PATTERSON: He seems to be most interested in the voyeur part of society. He's an obsessive man and he's overly interested in films. The film is created and it then creates its own obsession, because you have obsessive people and I think that is part of the story of what film is doing.

MARK LAWSON: Terry Johnson has been trying in a lot of works and he did a play about The Graduate and he's trying to merge between film and theatre, and one of the strands of the play is actually on film. Did that work?

JEANETTE WINTERSON: Not particularly well. The clean economy of the set works well. I enjoyed that.

TOM PAULIN: But then it gets fussy.

JEANETTE WINTERSON: It does, but the play as a whole doesn't work. It would be better on television. It is a difficult transition to the second act where the audience are lost completely.

TOM PAULIN: Its sitcom stuff, with those boring, tedious wisecracks.

JAMES PATTERSON: At the end he talks about a lifetime of being looked at instead of love. But in a way it is a lifetime of looking. Which we all do instead of loving.