This summer, the North Wall has two things to celebrate: its fifth birthday and its first in-house theatrical production.

And it is due to long-time contact between the North Wall’s artistic director Lucy Maycock and Barry Kyle — honorary associate director of the Royal Shakespeare Company — that the forthcoming production of Dead On Her Feet is being mounted in Summertown.

The play is set during the Depression in the States, when people engaged in desperate dance marathons to try and win cash prizes. Ring any bells? Yes, of course: the 1969 film They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? starring Jane Fonda and Gig Young and based on a 1935 novella of the same name. Last year, Emmy Award-winning screenwriter Ron Hutchinson wrote a play entitled ShootHorses — which Kyle directed as a try-out at an American university; and now, renamed and completely redrafted, the two have brought it to Oxford as a world premiere.

“We discovered that the idea for the novella came to its author, Horace McCoy, when he was working as a bouncer at one of these dancing events’, Hutchinson told me. “He jotted down what he saw and decided he could make 20 dollars by banging it out. This is a roman-à-clef about how that book came to be rather than the book itself. The dance craze became the American Idol of its day, when every deadbeat dance hall put on one of these shows and you’d sit there with your popcorn watching those poor buggers kill themselves for your entertainment.”

The main conceit of Dead On Her Feet is the McCoy character, a promoter called Mel Carney (played by Jos Vantyler) seeing Bonnie (Kelly Gibson) amid the human flotsam and jetsam washed up in a small American town — and Hutchinson makes her the real-life antecedent of the main character in the novella, Gloria. “We’re musing on how the writer might have spotted one girl in the crowd and decided that there was something in her that he could use. Obviously he’s fascinated by the dilemma of somebody in extremis.”

Interestingly, Ron Hutchinson hasn’t seen the 1969 film and, as a screenwriter himself, perhaps that’s just as well.

“I taught at the American Film Institute and someone there did a course on how bad that screenplay is! I’ve stayed away from the movie because I didn’t want to be deflected from my own story by what some people see as a masterpiece of counter-cultural film-making and others as a dog’s dinner!”

Barry Kyle was with Hutchinson rehearsing at the North Wall, and he’s been driven by the modern parallels in the play. “Carney is a sum of those people who are the entrepreneurs of our times — Bill Gates, Richard Branson , Simon Cowell, for example — all dynamic economic magicians. We’re trying to create a dynamic political play at a time when we are now in the second Great Depression, a recession that has now been going on several years longer than any of us anticipated.

“The film They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? was actually about Vietnam, and Jane Fonda’s support for the North Vietnamese only made it more so. And what that proves is that the original novella is a lens through which we can see multiple political stories of exploitation’. Quite deliberately, Kyle then made a link to the fact that Oxford is ‘on the edge of Cameron Country, very near where the major intellectual narrative connected to economic regeneration is being played out’.

Clever stuff and it’s much to the credit of the North Wall that they’ve grabbed this production before it moves on for a stint in London in October. The last word goes to Barry Kyle, who seems unable to speak without creating quotations perfect for previews like this. Leaving aside all matters of politics and economics, he told me he’d said to the cast, ‘This is not a dance show. This is Macbeth with dance music performed by Radiohead’! No, I don’t either.

Dead On Her Feet is at the North Wall September 6-15. Call 01865 319450, pop into the theatre in South Parade or visit www.thenorthwall.org