’39 Steps’ The Play Is Well-Played And Very Funny

By Norwood Long
Special To The Standard
Want to see a funny movie? Try “The 39 Steps” at Northern Stage in White River Junction, showing through November 21. Sure, it’s not a movie – it’s a play with real people on a stage – but as director Catherine Doherty said in a pre-play talk it uses a lot of movie techniques: jump cuts, scenes within scenes, running narration. There’s a good reason it’s so cinematic: it’s a practically verbatim version of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1939 movie.
And of course, that film wasn’t actually meant to be funny (although with Hitchcock you can never quite tell). But the play is flat-out farce, a story with 40 or 50 characters played by four actors on a nearly bare stage. Very good actors, too, which such a tour de farce requires: a dashing, athletic leading man played by John Patrick Hayden (who starred in Hamlet last year, not much brooding here); three beautiful heroines, all played by Kathryn Merry (Moon over Buffalo, 2006); and two clowns as cops, spies, rocks, and everything else: Richard Price (The Elephant Man, 2008), and newcomer Kevin Crewell.
It all began with a book published in 1915 by John Buchan (who as Governor General of Canada would declare war on Germany in 1939), about German spies in England and Scotland stealing military secrets just before WW I. Buchan called his book “a thriller.” Peter Saccio of Dartmouth, who organizes the Athena lectures at Northern Stage, describes it as the brooding, scenery filled story of Richard Hannay, a bored mining engineer who is suddenly thrust into intrigue when he is suspected of killing a double agent and has to flee for his life. Hitchcock moved the tale to the eve of WW II, and added a love interest or two. Since then it’s been filmed at least twice more and made into a Masterpiece Theater series, as were additional Hannay stories.
So how did a serious melodrama end up as comedy? A couple of actors in Yorkshire, England tried it as a two character show, then asked writer-director Patrick Barlow to recast it for four characters. It opened in Yorkshire in 2005, moved to London in 2006, and won an Olivier award for Best Comedy in 2007, when it also came to the U.S. and was nominated for six Tony awards. After moving around on Broadway it closed this January, then promptly reopened off Broadway. When I first saw it at the Cort Theater in 2009 I was struck by how funny and theatrical it was.
So what’s funny? Of course what tickles me bores you and vice versa, so at the risk of going out on a limb I’ll say it is exactly the excitement of seeing a real if far-fetched story that stretches over hundreds of miles and dozens of locations and characters emerge convincingly from a bare stage and four actors. You want a train, and a chase across the roof, ending in a death-defying dangle from the bridge over the Forth? You got it. You want a wild chase across the bare heather hills in Scotland with the hero handcuffed to an unwilling maiden? You got it. You even want airplanes spitting bullets at the desperate hero? That’s right, you got it. And at the same time you’re laughing, you’re rooting for the hero and drawn into the love story. Or at least I was. Warning: at least one or two of the audience around me in effect didn’t get the joke; they wanted the story straight.
Briggs Opera House, which seats 245 on three sides of a relatively small stage, is an actor’s theater. Most people are within 50 feet of the stage, the sets are ingenious but never lavish, and the bare bones of the lights are in plain sight. So it takes that old theater magic to draw the audience in. Which it does. The lead, John Patrick Hayden, not only looks the part of a man of adventure, he moves like one (he also stages stage fights). Watch while he both becomes and climbs through a window, or preens while hearing himself described as “handsome.” Kathryn Merry is every bit his match-watch the two of them climb over, under, and through a fence while handcuffed together, or take off Pamela’s stockings while handcuffed. When Kathryn is a slinky German spy she is very slinky and very German; as an attention starved Scottish housewife she is all dewy-eyed need; and as tough, urbane Pamela she is sleek sophistication. The two clowns make dozens of costume changes, sometimes several in as many seconds, shifting characters and accents. Here they are husband and wife innkeepers in Scotland, an instant later they are spies being ejected by the wife. Richard Price is suitably glassy-eyed and programmed as a master mentalist, used against his will as a recording machine; Kevin Crewell is a snarling and sinister master spy. The two become rocks on either side of a stream blocking the handcuffed pair in flight. Physical comedy is hard; they make it look easy.
Catherine Doherty and her production crew are very much masters of illusion, seamlessly moving from scene to scene, keeping our eyes on the actors and the story. In one minute we’re in a lecture hall at a political rally, in the next the lectern becomes the steering wheel and hood of an automobile.
Reservations: I sometimes found the comedy too broad, trying too hard. Parodies of a thick Scottish accent are a little tired, and the grim Scottish farmer with the pretty young wife borders on caricature. There is also a thin line between actors sharing the joke that they’re really actors on a bare stage and mugging, and occasionally I thought they were on the wrong side of it; when Richard and Pamela are blocked by a “stream” Richard finally says to one of the “rocks,” “Oh get on with it.” But all in all, it was an amazingly assured and impressive ensemble. Go see what you think. As the show goes on, I suspect they will find a smoother rhythm and draw on each other’s strengths.
Lights and sound should get special mention. The lighting helped control the mood and flow of the show in a very impressive way, never obtrusive, but always an element. The sound effects, drawn largely from the Hitchcock film, required spit-second timing, which they got. A thoroughly professional production, beautifully directed and played.