It is 95 years since Alfred Hitchcock’s genre-defining suspense movie The 39 Steps brought the bones of John Buchan’s story to the screen and, while the film still stands up solidly as a classic, there is something about that style of 1930s melodrama that encourages a tongue-in-cheek retelling.
This 20 year old stage adaptation by Patrick Barlow (itself a reworking of an earlier stage version) has enjoyed tremendous success, and continues to delight audiences across the globe in seemingly endless revivals. Stephen Mallatratt’s The Woman in Black set a trend for staging stories that contain a myriad of characters with a tiny cast, but The 39 Steps eschews the serious and makes maximum mileage of the comedy aspect of this technique, and it has surely inspired other shows such as Laura Eason’s Around the World in 80 days.
For all Barlow’s irreverent style, the play remains astonishingly faithful to the screenplay it is based upon, and it gives its cast of four players quite a workout in bringing the many varied locations to life with a minimum of physical props.
Angelo Edwards and Jonathan Francis first appear as Mr Memory and the stage compere in the story’s London Palladium opening scene, but it isn’t long before they are pirouetting on the spot donning a sequence of different hats to portray two or three characters almost simultaneously. Edwards has enormous fun with ridiculous voices and yet more ridiculous wigs, while Francis succeeds in injecting both buffoonery and surprising subtlety into some of his personae. Tilly Kimpton, meanwhile, gets to inhabit the variety of femmes fatale who seem to fall with alarming frequency into the lap of the story’s reluctant hero.
And so to Alex Wight, who has the good fortune to occupy the shoes of Richard Hannay throughout the performance. Bereft of his familiar beard, Wight still sports a terribly British moustache behind which he keeps the stiffest of upper lips. Hannay is not only the role around which the plot revolves, but is also what holds the whole play together, and Wight gives a glorious, energetic yet drily witty performance.
The ensemble throw themselves into the enterprise with considerable glee, which transmits well to the audience and keeps the laughter coming all evening. Everything is lucid despite the zany narrative, although there is a little unevenness in the vocal projection at times. Director Lexie Fox-Hutchings has wisely kept the scenic elements and props to the barest minimum, inviting us to employ the imagination to fill in the detail. The only possible flaw in pacing is due to a number of protracted scene transitions that take place behind a closed curtain. Presumably this is to allow more for costume than scenic change, but more of these played out in at least partial view might avoid drops in energy and would not seem out of place amidst the overall style. However, this is a tiny niggle compared to the overall success in keeping the story on track and full of excellent physical and vocal comedy.
The 39 Steps is a cracking night of theatre that welcomes the New Year in at the Little Theatre in style and, happily for the company, all performances are pretty much sold out for the remainder of the week-long run, which includes at two-show day on the closing Saturday.
Angelo Edwards, Alex Wight and Jonathan Francis in The 39 Steps - Picture by Stephen Cain Photography
This review was originally written for publication by Good News Liverpool
Comments
Post a Comment