“Golly!”
So says Richard Hannay, the hero of “The 39 Steps” when the body of a beautiful female spy falls into his lap with a knife in her back. It’s also what the audience is likely to say as this highly popular adaptation of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 movie of the same name at Main Street Theater unfolds not with Hitchcock’s signature suspense, but slapstick farce — all with minimal deviation from Hitchcock’s dialogue and scenes.
How it is possible to take a 1935 spy thriller and turn it into a comic laugh fest? Adapter Patrick Barlow’s solution is to reproduce the film on stage, where the film’s thriller conventions become ridiculous. Take Hitchcock’s signature use of train scenes. In his films from “The Lady Vanishes” to “North by Northwest,” he loves putting his characters on trains — especially as the heroes try to escape the villains chasing them. In the film of “The 39 Steps,” this leads to a scene standard in many thrillers still, where the characters exit the moving train and inch their way along its sheer sides while the train rushes along its track. This is easily done in movies, but how can it happen on stage? Where movies take advantage of controlled studios, stunt doubles, and camera angles, the stage can rely only on the pantomime skills of its actors who have to make audiences believe they are moving when they are actually fixed on stage and also create the effects of moving when there is no literal cause: wind, speed, danger. In doing so, the play’s actors create visibly comic actions that drain suspense and replace it with laughter.
This requires that the actors master timing and bodily exaggeration — especially since the script calls for only four performers: the hero, a woman in three different large roles, and two people identified only as “Clown 1” and “Clown 2,” but playing a multitude of parts, some only seconds in duration. This production’s director, Kara Greenberg, has everyone moving with clockwork precision, and the actors’ comic talents complete the comic triumph.
Kevin Crouch, as the play’s beset hero and everyman Richard Hannay, communicates an innocence that at times borders on stupidity, both of which prove useful as he manages each of his narrow escapes. In contrast, Meg Rodgers as the doomed spy, a lonely Scottish housewife, and Hannay’s love interest Pamela, captures the flatness of her first two characters while, as Pamela, showing her slow developing belief in Hanny’s improbable story. But it is the production’s two clowns, Wesley Whitson as Clown 1 and Chris Szeto-Joe as Clown 2 who largely steal the show—especially Whitson. Both are magnificent as old men at a political meeting, women’s underwear salesmen on the train, and the villainous henchman, but Whitson’s ability to play female characters of various ages despite his moustache inches ahead in the race to elicit belly laughs. All are fast and capable of showing character changes with slight props or bits of a costume. Most importantly, they never drop the illusion of believing in their situations no matter how silly they appear.
Ryan McGettigan’s set design gets the maximum use from Main Street’s tight spaces with a minimum of materials, and Paige Wilson’s costume choices are ideal and able to evoke the highlands of Scotland and 1930s England.
Running around two hours, the speed of the production makes it seem shorter than many an episode of a TV sitcom with the need for canned laughter. And whether you know the ending from watching Hitchcock’s movie or arrive as clueless as a police inspector working with Sherlock Holmes, the revelation of the 39 steps still works.
But with this play that starts in a London music hall and ends at the Palladium, it is the stage that starts here — a practical demonstration of what, in an entertainment world dominated by film, the theater can still do.
For a summer refreshment, climb Main Street’s “39 Steps” to an evening of hilarity.
“The 39 Steps” is at Houston’s Main Street Theater through Aug. 10.
Robert Donahoo is a professor at Sam Houston State University and writes theater reviews for The Courier
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