The 39 Steps was one of Alfred Hitchcock’s first films released in Britain. This was before The Birds, Vertigo, and especially before he chased Carey Grant down with a crop duster in North by Northwest. It is the story about one Richard Hanny, a man who has just returned from Canada (or at least traveling) to his posh flat in west London (Greater Portland Street). Upon his return he attends a West End Show, a music hall type of performance where he meets a strange woman who asks to go home with him. When they arrive at his flat, she tells him that there are men following her and she needs to get to the “Big House” in Scotland to see a man who knows how to stop the plot to sneak secret plans called “The 39 Steps” out of the country and aid the Germans. She later ends up with (gasp!) a knife in her back! Hanny then flees London in an effort to finish what this strange woman set off to do where he meets strange characters who are not all they seem to be, beautiful Scottish women, and even manages to speak to a political rally while at the same time trying to allude the police who think he is the one to blame for the strange woman’s murder!
They took this story (that Hitch actually adapted from an earlier novel) and made it into a play that works more as a homage to Hitchcock than the play about a man trying to find out just what are these “39 Steps”? The play is pact with physical humor and slapstick comedy. With a cast of only 4 (yes 4 people play more than 20 roles all together) they manage to keep the laughs coming one right after the other. This play, since it is even advertised as “Alfred Hitchcock’s, The 39 Steps” is filled with references to the Hitchcock Cannon, physical and sight gags to set all of the audience in a roar. This won’t be the most thought provoking or amazing bit of theatre you will ever see, but it is a damn fun night out and it brings you back to the time of playwrights like Coward and Wilde.
Tomorrow: Wastewater at the Royal Court
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