The wartime spy thriller The 39 Steps doesn't leave a lot of room for laughs, in either the classic Hitchcock 1930s film or the 1915 book by John Buchan. So playwright Patrick Barlow’s staged version at the Trafalgar Theatre provides a refreshing antidote to those more serious depictions of the same story, namely of a man wrongly accused of a crime in prewar Britain who feels compelled to chase two spies hiding in Scotland on the utterings of the dying woman he’s supposed to have stabbed.
Instead, this performance turns this suspenseful story on its head, into a mixture of the ridiculous and outright comedic. The four-actor play makes a virtue of part swapping, with the same actors talking to mirror images of themselves playing different roles as well as men and women playing each other in a production that takes blind casting to its limit.
There’s versatility and an abundance of acrobatics in the performances by Tom Byrne, who plays Richard Hannay, the runaway who's supposed to have knifed in the back his femme fatale, acted by Safeena Ladha, and around whom he behaves rather awkwardly when she makes a play for him at his London flat after their meeting at the London Palladium Theatre. Following the plot of the Hitchcock film, it's there that we are first introduced to the unforgettable Mr Memory, played by Eugene McCoy.
But unlike the film, both McCoy and Maddie Rice go on to play various other parts, such as the baddies trying to kidnap Richard and Pamela, the prim woman Hannay meets on a train when he absconds to Scotland to search out the spies about to betray the nation to the enemy. They hit upon an inn tucked away in the Galloway Hills where hosts, played by Eugene McCoy and Maddie Rice, vow to keep the secret of this seemingly recently loved-up runaway couple.
Throughout the two-act play, the mannerisms and gestures of this very versatile and hard-working group of actors help portray a full complement of characters, aided by portable scenery and effective lighting and sound. The comic physicality of the actors is a treat to watch, such as in scenes where they step through a hollow wooden square to indicate escaping from a window, and others where they flap their coats to simulate being caught in a gale.
Their accents change dramatically as their roles swap within this production that's set in 1935 but which embellishes and parodies the stiff upper lip and overstated sense of formality of the day. But the laughs are also on the performance itself, which introduces the occasional element of puppetry, such as when the runaway couple encounter the Loch Ness monster, as well as the use of playful references to famous scenes in other Hitchcock films, with Hannay running along a field and trying to duck the gunfire from a small overhead plane, akin to Carey Grant’s infamous scene in North by Northwest, and another that mimics the imminent stabbing from the outside of a shower curtain in Psycho.
In many ways, this slightly silly and jumbled-up play, directed by Nicola Samer, who remounts the original production by Maria Aitken, almost veers into slapstick and pantomime territory, with audience participation in scenes that are patently absurd. Ultimately though, the performances are slick, move in a balletic tandem and seemed to delight the audience.
Set designer Peter McKintosh has made much of some simple arrangements that enable numerous scene changes to move slickly from the Palladium to Hannay’s London flat to the train going to Edinburgh and then to the guesthouse in rural Scotland and the home of the spy who has earned high position in society, amounting to a fine example of visual theatre overlaid with entertainment that nonetheless maintains a sense of intrigue without ever losing the plot.