Slick, quick, fast, and funny – This new adaptation of John Buchan’s 39 Steps relies on immaculate timing. There are lightning changes of costume and character. The cast of four plays a range of parts with aplomb, perfect comic nouse and virtuoso performances.
While Tom Byrne and Safeena Ladha are spot on with Byrne as a smooth as silk Richard Hannay and Ladha as the beautiful Pamela, both with finely enunciated 1930s accents, Ladha also plays two other, sharply contrasting female characters and Eugene McCoy and Maddie Rice each play some six roles each – often he playing the tall women and she the feisty men.
As they might have said in the 1930s when this is set, it all works terribly well.
The play is a glorious parody of stagecraft. Phones ring just after people say they have heard them ringing. Fog appears after we have already heard how thick it its.
Chairs slide onto the stage the moment after people have been invited to sit on them. The props appear from all directions and the actors’ own essential timing never misses a beat.
Buchan wrote the book in 1915 and Alfred Hitchcock’s film was in 1935.
There are several nods in the script to other Hitchcock movies. Hannay escapes at one point through “the Rear Window”. Pamela refuses to climb a ladder because she has “Vertigo”. At one point, we see a knife stabbing the air behind a shower curtain.
While being enormous fun, the play respects the original story, set as the world anticipated the Second World War.
The rather bored, young, and attractive Hannay is at the theatre seeing an act called Mr Memory when a beautiful woman with an archly foreign accent shoots a gun into the air and begs him to hide her in his flat in London’s Portland Place.
She tells him about spies about to pass state secrets out of Britain, mentions something called The 39 Steps and warns him that now his life is in danger as well as hers. He sleeps in an armchair, of course, giving her his bed.
The next morning, he finds her dead with a knife in her back.
He realises two things: he will be accused of her murder– and those secrets must be prevented from leaving these shores.
His dual mission to escape arrest and stop the spies takes him to Scotland by rail and along the way, involves his climbing on the top of a train and hanging on under a bridge, trudging over rough terrain and nights spent in very odd places.
Eventually the significance of The 39 Steps is revealed, the spies are unmasked, and love conquers all.
Adapted by Patrick Barlow, directed by Maria Aitkin and Nicola Samer, this is a truly engaging show with plenty of laughs and some lovely incidental music which gives the piece warmth as well as wit.
The 39 Steps is at Cambridge Arts Theatre until Saturday, May 11.
