The 39 Steps starts strong but loses footing
For new Centaur chief Eda Holmes, debuting as director here with the riotous spoof The 39 Steps must have seemed like Christmas come early.
Adapted by Patrick Barlow from the John Buchan spy thriller (by way of Alfred Hitchcock), the show is famous for being a cash-raking, multi-awardwinning juggernaut, its non-stop barrage of sight gags and affectionately sent-up thriller clichés marking it as a surefire hit worldwide.
As it turns out, it feels more like a McGuffin, one of those unidentified Hitchcockian thingamajigs that all the characters want to get their hands on but which actually proves a bit of a headache.
Things start out splendidly enough. Michael Gianfrancesco’s set design, all lush red curtains, crumbling walls and backstage lumber, suggests a grand but dilapidated vaudevillian theatre. Andrew Shaver is, initially, a delight as the tweedy, pencil-moustache-sporting Richard Hannay, whom he plays as an amiably silly ass, for all his heroic dash.
Early scenes of a tacky Memory Man variety act (the line “What’s the distance between Winnipeg and Montreal?” is actually in the original film) and a fatal tryst with Amelia Sargisson’s mysterious German spy just about hit the right note of silliness and smoky celluloid magic. Andrea Lundy’s atmospheric lighting helps with the ’30s noir feel, too.
Sargisson also plays the awfully nice gal whom Hannay literally gets attached to as he flees the murder scene to Scotland. Trent Pardy and Lucinda Davis fill in all the other roles, including murderous secret agents, bumbling police officers, elderly Scottish hoteliers and travelling salesmen.
I particularly enjoyed Hannay’s continual business with his pipe, including the inspired use to which he puts it during a getaway involving a Salvation Army band. And of the several tributes to other Hitchcock films, the highlight is perhaps the variation on Frenzy’s corpse-in-a-potato-sack scene, with Hannay getting into all kinds of tastelessly ribald scrapes with the freshly murdered body of a femme fatale.
But a growing suspicion that the actors have been given free rein to muck about to their heart’s content soon sets in. Comic routines full of wacky voices, funny walks and the like needlessly go on forever. What starts out as an amusing series of theatre-gone-wrong mishaps — dropped cues, chaotic costume changes, pratfalls over furniture — soon becomes wearyingly predictable.
Not only does all that zany mayhem muffle the efficiently plotted story, it dulls the edge of what should be snappy and precise physical comedy. No doubt some of those routines seemed riotously funny in the rehearsal
room, but a lot of them had no business making it to the final cut.
Part of the problem also lies in the relentless larkiness of Barlow’s script. Hitchcock, with his film version (itself a cheeky send-up of Buchan’s novel), knew enough to deliver on the thrills, and to balance the laughs with some weightier moments. The film’s depiction of savage domestic abuse in a remote crofter’s cottage, Hannay’s rallying cry against incipient fascism at a byelection meeting: these scenes are played entirely for laughs here. What a shame neither the script nor this production took a chance on providing a bit of a tonal shift with these moments, which might have elevated it to being something more than an over-extended parody sketch.