The 39 Steps, a comedic play adapted by Patrick Barlow from John Buchnan’s 1915 novel, inevitably stands in the shadow of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 film adaptation. Director Maria Aitken grapples with this connection, albeit unsuccessfully, in her West End interpretation currently playing at the Criterion Theater in London.
Aitken approaches the story with a heightened awareness of the play’s connection to the silver screen. Simulating the projector of an old movie theater, cool lights flicker as actors bring on the set pieces at the top of the show. The set itself, designed by Peter McIntosh, represents the raw brick interior of an old warehouse. Suggestive of an empty theater, the set design is a deconstructionist nod to the production’s ambiguity of artistic genre. It matches the sentiment in which the play was written, with four actors portraying over twenty characters throughout the course of the play. The set design is a blank canvas that invites the actors to build a narrative from the ground upwards. It engenders expectations that the play itself is not able to meet.
While the technical elements of light and set design effectively establish the tension between artistic genres in The 39 Steps, the ensuing action eschews this sophistication in its blundering along another borderline of genre: the divide between comedy and drama. Although the source film, The 39 Steps, is frequently labeled as Hitchcock’s most comedic work, the story and dialogue evoke more suspense than laughter. Richard Hannay, the central character and the only part played by a single actor in the dramatic adaptation, is framed for murder after finding a woman dead in his apartment. He is continually on the run from the police and foreign spies until he can uncover the meaning of the mysteriously articulated “39 steps.” The play construes the slightest physical details in the Hitchcock film as comedy: the murder scene becomes an opportunity for physical comedy when the agent with a knife in her back develops a sudden onslaught of rigor mortis; the small piece of paper she grasps in her hand as a clue becomes an unwieldy map that blows against the hero’s face when a sudden wind enters the theater.
The slapstick gimmicks continue throughout the play in the tradition of silent film greats Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. However, this secondary film allusion merely exhibits a desperation: the story and dialogue attempt to be funny when intrinsically it should be serious. The physical stunts are cliché—sudden winds intrude on the action more often than is necessary or, more importantly, funny. Even if they were done more deftly, these physical jokes would not be enough to sustain the play. The 39 Steps confounds the tension between artistic genres that it set forth so well in the first ten seconds of the play by recklessly tapping into other filmic genres. Caught between Hitchcock and Chaplin, drama and comedy, the play exhibits a fatal identity crisis.
The most effective comedic trope is the two generic male actors (played admirably by Dermot Canavan and Sean Kearns) who portray a majority of the twenty-some characters in quick succession, complete with costume changes and cross-dressing. However, even this oasis in an otherwise dry comedy is self-defeating: the scarcity of bodies on stage creates an atmosphere of isolation that negates the potential excitement of the chase. The small cast makes it practically impossible to convey any plot-propelling sense of danger. The production tries to remedy this emptiness to some degree by playing out to the audience. The real theatergoers become the audience for a play-within-a-play when Richard Hannay visits the London Palladium at the climax of his search for the 39 steps. However, the insufficient build-up of suspense and comedy fails to generate enough excitement in the audience to fuel such a ruse. The performances of Rufus Wright as Richard Hannay and Laura Rogers as the female lead and other minor female roles are similarly uninspired.
The London production of The 39 Steps begs the question: why adapt a spy novel-turned-Hitchcock-drama into a theatrical farce? The project presents an opportunity to challenge the relationship between theater and cinema, or to explore the tense borderline between drama and comedy. Instead, The 39 Steps perpetually seeks to resolve or ignore these tensions, culminating in a piece of theater that is unoriginal, underwhelming, and only marginally amusing.
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