FORGET about John Buchan, who wrote the 1915 novel The Thirty-Nine Steps; Alfred Hitchcock certainly did, when he adapted Buchan’s tale of derring-do and desperate measures for his 1935 film, starring Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll, so freely that it was barely recognisable.
This new stage version by Patrick Barlow, the creator of the wonderfully daft double act the National Theatre of Brent, similarly ignores Buchan’s original, pre-First World War yarn, concentrating instead on Hitchcock’s update, a witty Thirties thriller laced with erotic tension.
Barlow seems uncertain whether he is poking fun or paying homage. All his best dialogue is lifted wholesale from the screenplay — specific shots are spoofily re-created onstage and the quick-changing cast of four play all the characters as crude impersonations of their celluloid counterparts. Nothing in Barlow’s approach is fresh or inspired; the action isn’t exciting and the romance isn’t sexy. You wonder why he bothered, when Hitchcock did it so much better.
The central joke of Fiona Buffini’s production is its low-rent quality. Furniture is yanked on and off with ropes; train carriages are constructed out of packing cases. And when our hero, Richard Hannay, wanted by the police for a murder he didn’t commit and by a sinister spy ring because he knows too much, is chased across the Scottish Highlands, the scene is played out in inept shadow puppetry. It’s all rather cluttered and too chaotic to have much real comic effect.
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There is fleeting fun in the sudden appearance of a shady trench-coated figure beneath the lamp-post he has just brought on with him, or in the breathtaking speed with which the actors swap roles, but there’s much more that is pretty feeble.
The famous sequence in which a hotly pursued Hannay clings precariously to the Forth Bridge, so gripping in the film, here involves nothing more nailbiting or inventive than the erection of a couple of step ladders. Not that it would matter much if you felt his life really was in danger; it’s hard to care about characters who are so relentlessly sent up. And it’s that, above all, that scuppers this show.
Hitchcock’s film may be dated, but it’s involving in ways that this pallid parody never even attempts. Mark Hadfield, Simon Gregor, Robert Whitelock as Hannay, and Lisa Jackson as the woman who ends up as his reluctant, handcuffed accomplice, all work hard, but you still end up feeling cheated.
The only 39 steps anyone in search of real entertainment should take are in the opposite direction.