Spy thriller? This 39 Steps is a HOOT!
The 39 Steps (Richmond Theatre and touring) Verdict: Stairway to comic heaven ★★★★✩
The Divine Mrs S (Hampstead Theatre, London) Verdict: Semi-divinity ★★★✩✩
The Dream Of A Ridiculous Man (Marylebone Theatre, London) Verdict: Redemption song ★★★★✩
PATRICK BARLOW’S madcap adaptation of John Buchan’s very British spy story (later turned into the 1935 Hitchcock movie) has been going so long you might have thought it had run out of road. Fat chance.
After a nine-year break, the once ubiquitous caper is back on tour, in a delightful new production. The secret of its success is combining intrigue and romance with flat-out comedy.
After our hero Richard Hannay is stitched up for the murder of a glamorous German brunette who insinuates her way into his Maida Vale flat, he is pursued by cops and killers across the Scottish Highlands in his search for the truth about the mysterious ‘39 steps’.
Pre-Barlow, most sane people would have considered this story unstageable. And yet using the larkiest tricks of physical theatre, he proved them all wrong.
This new show adds another layer of friskiness as Hannay flees a pair of Mackintosh-andtrilby sporting spooks (lurking under a lamppost outside his flat), scales the Forth Road bridge (a ladder and two Aframes), before fleeing over shadow-puppet moorland, and winding up in the Highland croft of a Bible-bashing sheepfarmer and his unusually comely wife.
The fun had by the actors is infectious. Tom Byrne is gleeful as the pencil-tashed Hannay in a dapper, three-piece tweed suit, oozing all the bashful, upper- class charm of Hugh Grant (the early years).
Finding himself caught up in a political meeting in the Highlands, he demands what everyone wants: ‘a square deal and a sporting chance’.
Safeena Ladha also has fun as the glamourpuss blonde hitched to Hannay — literally
— by a pair of handcuffs. Eugene McCoy amuses in sundry roles including the Godfearing crofter, and Maddie
Rice has a ball as the dastardly Professor with the missing pinky-finger.
Even the dodgy accents are part of the joke.
Add a melodramatic film score and meteorological sound effects and you have a helterskelter frolic that remains a stairway to comic heaven.
BY TODAY’S standards, the 18th- century tragic actress Sarah Siddons was a social media celebrity: sharing her thoughts with her followers in print, and curating her public image through airbrushed portraits by leading artists of the day, including Thomas Gainsborough.
Yet April De Angelis’s new play, The Divine Mrs S (starring Rachael Stirling), is more interested in Siddons’s tribulations than her triumphs.
Fainting fits backstage and grief over the loss of her chilfantasy dren in childhood take precedence over her well documented joie de vivre.
But most disappointingly, the piece shows Mrs S beset by a series of frivolous — mostly male — caricatures, including Dominic Rowan as her preposterous stentorian brother.
Female characters fare better, with Stirling combining tension and poise for De Angelis’s idea of Siddons as a tortured soul-searcher.
And Eva Feiler amuses as a runaway fan who was has been inspired by Siddons to abandon her children.
Feiler also plays a nervous Scottish writer, Joanna Baillie, who Siddons prizes as a feminist trailblazer, in a storyline that sadly fizzles out.
There is exuberant theatricality in Anna Mackmin’s broad and often cheerful production, set backstage at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane.
But while it’s good to see this hale and long-lived figure of crafty self-advancement rediscovered, it’s a shame to find her slightly diminished.
THE Dream Of A Ridiculous Man is a short story by Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky that’s been updated by director Laurence Boswell as a vision of redemption in modern Hackney.
Our hero (Greg Hicks) is a loner who has come to believe that human life is an unhappy accident without meaning.
Ostracised, isolated and terminally depressed, he resolves to top himself.
But he’s saved by a dream of paradise, in a tale that turns out to be an allegory of the degradation and original sin of capitalism. Salutary as that may be, it’s also a bit simplistic.
Instead, the really interesting thing about Boswell’s production — and Hicks’s performance — is the ease with which they both move between different levels of experience: reality, dream, psychosis and unfettered imagination.
Loren Elstein’s staging transforms a bare black set with blurry city lights projected on a rear curtain, and immerses us in impressive wraparound sound effects.
Hicks looks like an emaciated Euro- clown in a jacket that’s too small, highwater trousers and espadrilles.
Multiple accents catch the flavour of melting-pot Hackney and his supple, expressive movement takes us on a cosmic joyride.
The ending is a sentimental reversal of Dostoyevsky’s conclusion, but — with acting like this — I’m willing to forgive it.