Original concept: Simon Corble and Nobby Dixon
Adapter: Patrick Barlow
Director: Nicola Samer
This touring production of Olivier and Tony award-winning comedy, The 39 Steps, retains all its freshness, pace and fun. In Patrick Barlow’s delicious adaptation, it’s a thoroughly sweet show, a homage not just to Hitchcock’s 1935 film, but to the whole genre of Hollywood movies of the period. Above all, this is physical theatre at its best.
The ensemble playing is excellent, all exaggeratedly stylised movements and expressions, well-choreographed set pieces and an overall fleetness of foot and vocal variety. Repetition is very much part of the joke – so there are numerous scenes in which the cast all react to a sharp blast of wind bursting in through a door by energetically beating the skirts and shirt-tails and clinging onto headgear. And the simplicity of the props is part of the fun too – there’s only ever one door which keeps being wheeled about so characters can make dramatic entrances. Plus there’s a solitary window through which our hero, Richard Hannay, repeatedly makes his escape, sometimes wearing the window frame.
Set pieces, as directed by Maria Aitken with Nicola Samer for the touring production, are endlessly inventive. The familiar trope of passengers bouncing around in a moving vehicle is given added zest by their having forgotten a steering wheel, which a stagehand helpful chucks on. Without giving too much away, one character is stabbed to death early on but manages to pass out horizontally across an armchair. Our hero limbo dances to extract himself from the chair, covers the body with a sheet, then tactfully turns back to pull it higher up to cover the protruding dagger.
The famous chase on the train to Edinburgh is perfectly realised with lighting to suggest passing carriage windows as Hannay races from compartment to compartment to evade capture. The sound design is great: thrilling music evokes the period’s adventure films plus there’s an overlay of steam train noises, clattering wheels and piercing police whistles. At one moment Hannay is embracing an unknown blonde beauty, the next he’s hanging off the Forth Bridge.
Tom Byrne, as Richard Hannay, is up to the challenge of playing posh English man who discovers both a love for adventure and his own heart. Eugene McCoy and Maddie Rice are tremendous in a number of pairings. They’re a Scottish professor and his well-to-do wife, the comedy ratched up by Rice taking on the professor with lanky McCoy, his sock suspenders peeping out from his tweed skirt, his flirtatious wife. Then they’re police officers, or raincoat-clad spies, or a milkman and newseller. McCoy transforms into a dour Calvinist crofter, but this time it’s the versatile Safeena Ladha who plays his innocent young wife, Margaret, with a mob cap and plaits, almost unrecognisable from her first turn as the stylish seductress, Annabella. And somehow she is also the blonde beauty, Pamela, who keeps trying to turn in Hannay, only for the pair to slowly realise they’re falling in love.
Oh yes, because there’s a wonderfully ludicrous plot whereby Hannay somehow has to stop some vital state secret from being transmitted to dastardly foreign spies, albeit it’s a secret he doesn’t understand. And of course, he’s been framed for the initial murder, the work of the same dastardly crew.
On top of this, there are great, deliberately amateurish puppets and hilarious blink-and-you’ll-miss-it references to other Hitchcock films. An evening of non-stop fun.
Runs until 6 April 2024 then touring
