The 39 Steps

The Thirty-Nine Steps started life in 1915 as a ‘man-on-the-run’ novel by John Buchan, but has been somewhat eclipsed by Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 film adaptation. From page to screen, The 39 Steps has finally been brought to the stage by writer and performer Patrick Barlow, who has won a slew of awards for this relentlessly amusing adaptation.

Just as Hitch took liberties with the original novel, so too does this new production. The ‘narrative’ plays a timorous, tenuous second fiddle to the verbal and physical horse-play which, together with Maria Aitkin’s excellent direction, is the real star of the show. The basic plot is thus: an innocent man learns too much about a dangerous spy ring and is pursued across Scotland, before returning to London to foil the villain’s dastardly plans. But that’s where the similarities with the book begin and end.

Patrick Barlow is perhaps best known for his po-faced creation Desmond Olivier Dingle, Artistic Director of the Theatre of Brent – a two-man am-dram outfit hopelessly (and occasionally hilariously) incapable of staging epic historical tales. The 39 Steps continues in this spoofing vein, with bathetic staging and risibly amateurish coups de théâtre.

It’s an affectionate piss-take, both of early Hollywood and the physical limitations of the theatre. The tropes of film noir and the spy thriller are sent-up in myriad ways – there’s a mysterious femme fatale with a Clouseau-meets-Garbo accent, a chisel-jawed, pipe-smoking, tweed-clad English ‘chap’, and incompetent whistle-blowing ‘Bobbies’ who pursue a fleeing malefactor through (and atop) a moving train. Great comic mileage is made of the shortcomings of the theatre; a tiny model train speeds across the stage, a ‘roaring fire’ turns out to be three weedy light bulbs, and the Forth Bridge is a ladder suspended between two step-ladders. These playful theatrical tricks sound a little obvious and pantomimic when listed like that, but I assure you they’re damn funny in the flesh.

The rather large dramatis personae (139 roles in 100 minutes!) is played with barn-storming zeal and genuine comedic flair by an excellent cast of four: Dugald Bruce-Lockheart as our hero, Natalie Walter as our hero’s various love interests, and the wonderfully goonish Richard Braine and Dan Starkey, whose quick costume changes and Tommy Cooper-esque hat swapping to denote different characters proved very funny, in a delightfully silly and buffoonish way. The play’s humour draws heavily on classic British TV comedians and sitcoms, with traces of the Two Ronnies, Tommy Cooper, Red Dwarf, Spike Milligan and perhaps even a touch of Leonard Rossiter all detectable to varying degrees.

What is so refreshing and rewarding about this knowingly hammy, gleefully twee production is that it mocks and spoofs with an obvious love and affection for it’s targets, in much the same way as Matthew Holness and Richard Ayoade did with Garth Merengi’s Dark Place. Whilst The 39 Steps offers a gentler, broader, more family-friendly kind of humour than TV spoofs such as Dark Place, it is just as finely observed and every inch as amusing.

The 39 Steps plays at Nottingham's Theatre Royal from Monday 14 to Saturday 19 June 2010.
 

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