For 70 years, the fictional character of Tom Ripley – a misanthropic, morally ambiguous and shape-shifting antihero – has gripped readers and film-lovers.

The creation of American writer Patricia Highsmith, he first appeared in her 1955 novel The Talented Mr Ripley, beginning as a near-destitute IRS stockroom clerk and con-artist living in New York City but evolving into a serial killer who murders and then takes over the identity of Dickie Greenleaf, a wealthy, not-so-talented painter living in the fictional Italian coastal town of Mongibello with a lovely house, a boat and an American admirer called Marge Sherwood.

Ripley’s evolution is enthralling and mind-boggling. His plan to murder emerges as suddenly as his coveting of Greenleaf’s privileged life. Now, Highsmith’s most famous character comes to the stage in playwright Joanna Murray-Smith’s adaptation of The Talented Mr Ripley.

Directed by Sarah Goodes (Julia, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), with Will McDonald (Heartbreak High) as Ripley, Raj Labade (The Office) as Dickie Greenleaf and Claude Scott-Mitchell (The Dry, The Last Anniversary) as Sherwood, the play is a pin-sharp study of a complex man and a nail-biting psychological thriller.

“Oh, absolutely, the whole story is about suspense,” Goodes says: “That gap between something happening and what your response is to it. In rehearsals, we’ve kept talking about the actual definition of suspense. You’re suspended between two things. In a way, the whole story of The Talented Mr Ripley is about that.

“Joanna’s written a piece that swings between being a noir film, like The Third Man, to being like a Wes Anderson work, to being a classic Strangers on a Train-style Hitchcock. And there’s also direct address. He’s got a relationship with the audience. You find out who that is later but really Ripley’s telling us the story.”

But who is Ripley? A relative nobody, he is sent on an all-expenses paid trip by Dickie’s father to convince his son to come home to New York. Dickie’s mother has leukemia and his father wants him to take over the family’s shipbuilding business. But when Ripley encounters Dickie – magnetically carefree and living a life of luxury and culture on the Italian coast – he cannot follow through with his mission. His ardour for Greenleaf’s identity, and desire to escape his own dismal existence, propels him to kill. And then, through extraordinary sleight of hand, he becomes Dickie Greenleaf.

“At the core of Tom is a void,” McDonald says. “Emptiness. He’s this black hole that kind of swallows up Dickie and Marge and Dickie’s parents. That, and the deep-seated shame of who he is, really drives the whole piece.”

Goodes agrees.

“It’s a moral tale in a way,” she says. “If you don’t know who you are, if you don’t anchor yourself or have a moral attachment to the world, then you are a risk to society. That’s the story of the outsider.

“If you feel like you owe the world nothing, then you can be like Ripley. You have no remorse or regret. You can move through it with this real sense of surgical precision and determination.”

Ripley is often labelled a psychopath, and Highsmith, who wrote 22 novels including The Price of Salt (later republished as Carol) and Strangers on a Train, another tale of murder and emotional blackmail, clearly had a thing for psychopaths. She even wondered if she was one herself, writing a diary entry in 1943, “Am I a psychopath?” She also referred to Ripley as her alter ego, sometimes signing letters “Love from Tom”.

What stands out with Tom Ripley – a person whose exploits would necessitate punishment if exposed – is that he is a character that many fans of the book, film and TV adaptations (Andrew Scott played him in the 2024 Netflix series Ripley) root for. This is despite his identity theft, financial crimes, emotional manipulations and murdering.

It’s a duality McDonald relishes.

“There was an interview that Andrew Scott gave about playing the character where he said Tom’s not inherently bloodthirsty, he’s not this horrendous, evil person who just loves murdering people,” McDonald says. “He’s doing it to survive. He thinks it’s something that he has to do to just stay alive.”

He says Scott-Mitchell is sometimes rattled by his character’s duality.

“She says there are times she is looking at me and going, ‘Oh, I feel sorry for you’,” he says. “And then other times she is going, ‘Oh my god, he’s horrible. I hate him’. I love that sense of confusion about him.”

Whether you love or hate him, Ripley is a stayer. Anyone wondering if he evades capture need only clock the four subsequent Ripley novels Highsmith wrote, with the last, Ripley Under Water, published in 1991.

But is he happy when he gets what he wants? In the 1999 film adaptation directed by Anthony Minghella, Matt Damon as Ripley reflects mournfully towards the final scenes: “I always thought it would be better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody”.

Scott-Mitchell points to strong connections in style and character between Ripley and The Picture of Dorian Gray.

“When you think about it, Dorian and Tom are both characters who are completely consumed by objects and beauty,” she says. “And they both end up in a very similar place.”

McDonald agrees.

“With Dorian, he’s beautiful and he’s gorgeous, but he is known throughout London as a scoundrel. He’s been corrupted,” he says. “His soul has been destroyed by what he’s done and he’s alone forever. A similar thing happens to Tom.

“There’s this wonderful moment in the book where he realises that, in the process of becoming Dickie Greenleaf and gaining all his things, by murdering him he can never let anyone be close to him ever again.

“He’ll have all these beautiful things and live this beautiful life, but what he really wanted and prayed for – love and closeness – he’ll never get it. In that sense, he fails in his objective.”

He does, however, hold up a mirror to people’s secret thoughts.

“Joanna has written the play in a way that talks to the inner demons in all of us,” Scott-Mitchell says. “We all have something sinister in our minds, whether we want to admit it, or even that we’re conscious of it. You have these moments where you’re listening to him and you’re like, ‘Oh, yeah, I see where he’s coming from.’ Then you step back and go, ‘Well, that feels a bit uncomfortable.’”

Most of The Talented Mr Ripley’s creative team have connections to work about Highsmith. Murray-Smith wrote the play Switzerland, a fictional look at the last years of Highsmith’s life, now being turned into a movie starring Helen Mirren. The co-premiere of the production at STC in 2014 was directed by Goodes and designed by Scott-Mitchell’s father, Michael Scott-Mitchell.

Goodes says one of the reasons Kip Williams commissioned Murray-Smith to adapt the work when he was STC’s artistic director was to continue such connections, primarily by giving new roles to the next generation of Australian actors.

“The thing about this piece is that it’s about people who are not fully formed yet,” Goodes says. “They’re in their 20s. This is the first time Ripley commits murder. In the other books, he’s an established murderer. So the emphasis was to find a group of young, amazing, next-generation actors to play it – to find the next big names on stage and screen. That was a real starting point.

“Theatre companies are under pressure to sell tickets, so they put known people on stage. But you need to be finding the next people that are going to be those known faces in the future.”

In that vein, too, The Talented Mr Ripley explores issues confronting the next generation, particularly with social media, surveillance, AI and identity theft.

“There’s this whole mirror world of our identity online,” Scott-Mitchell says. “We might have a social media profile that’s a particular way we present ourselves, but then there’s us in the flesh. Stripping that whole concept back to theatre is a really wonderful way of looking at it. Who are we? Which one is us? What makes you, you?”

The Talented Mr Ripley is at Roslyn Packer Theatre, Sydney, from August 19 to September 28; and the Arts Centre Melbourne from October 28 to November 23.