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Review: 'The 39 Steps'

BY LINDA WINER | linda.winer@newsday.com

January 16, 2008

The tall, tweedy Englishman with the pencil mustache is bored - no, positively world weary - from a life of restaurants and parties and, ho-hum, in the far distance, another rumor of war. He considers doing away with himself, but stiffens his standard-issue upper lip and decides to find something to do. "Something mindless and trivial. Something utterly pointless. I know," he says, brightening. "I'll go to the theater!"

It is with such a mindset that "The 39 Steps," which opened last night at the Roundabout Theatre Company, is probably best enjoyed. The diversion, a West End hit that grew from a tiny regional playhouse, is an utterly pointless but physically and conceptually ingenious spoof of Alfred Hitchcock's equally foolish but stylish and dead-serious spy thriller from 1935.

In fact, given the assignment and the material, the extended sketch is as clever as it knows how to be. The dozens of characters - Brits, Scots and nascent Nazis - are all played by just three tirelessly virtuosic actors. The fourth, Charles Edwards, portrays that tweedy Englishman named Richard Hannay, who goes to a music hall and gets seduced by an exotic spy who, before she is murdered, warns him that a "top secret secret" is about to be stolen from England.

Except for the self-conscious new prologue described above, Patrick Barlow's adaptation and Maria Aitken's production are remarkably faithful to the early Hitchcock.

What makes that remarkable is that, with a few impeccably selected props and great hats, the play carries us off on one cliff-hanging chase scene after another, as the dashing Hannay dashes from London to a speeding train to the Scottish moors to a sheep farm to a handsome estate to a provincial political rally to a charming inn and the London Palladium.

Did we mention he also escapes being crushed by the collision of two biplanes and just misses an encounter with the ominously tubby outline of Hitchcock, himself?

For all the distance traveled, ultimately, this is an oddball-style piece with nowhere to go. It is part SCTV, part screwball romantic comedy, with a little of Monty Python's demented silliness and a lot of expert physical comedy, meta-jokes about Hitchcock's greatest hits and even a wink at politicians' obsession with "change."

Do we care? Not much. But there are delicious moments, especially from quick-change, fast-talking accent-artists Cliff Saunders and Arnie Burton. Punched out at a Scottish police station, Saunders falls backward like a plank, flips over his head and bounces back casually to investigate a disturbance at the window. Burton, who looks a bit like Christopher Guest, finds invention within the cliches of a German disguised as an Englishman. Jennifer Ferrin has just the right snarky ingenue spirit as the spy, the lonely farmer's wife and the independent woman who ends up handcuffed to the accused murderer and hero.

And Edwards, the only holdover from the original London production, carries the Robert Donat role as if Hannay were a debonair hawk simultaneously looking for predators and for prey.

This is the sort of production in which characters carry their own window frames, through which they crawl for daring escapes. Costumes and sets, by Peter McKintosh, are a master class in doing a great deal with very little. Shadows loom and suspenseful violins scream. Everyone is extremely good at walking through invisible wind.

We cannot avoid wondering why this self-proclaimed pointless import is produced by Broadway's largest nonprofit theater, with above-the-title credit to almost a dozen other producers and Boston's Huntington Theatre. Guess it is hard times for good times all over.

THE 39 STEPS. Adapted by Patrick Barlow, directed by Maria Aitken. Roundabout Theatre Company, American Airlines Theatre, 227 W. 42nd St., Manhattan, through March 23. Tickets: $51.25- $96.25; 212-719-1300. Seen at Sunday afternoon preview.