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Roundabout's mounting of The 39 Steps is half homage to Hitchcock's classic thriller and half a merry, madcap spectacle of theatrical imagination.
An interview by Marc Miller
Alfred Hitchcock and Monty Python? The British film director and irreverent comedy troupe never, to the best of our knowledge, crossed paths. The two institutions may seem utterly at odds: Hitchcock, the consummate engineer of cinematic suspense, specialized in innocent-hero-in-guilty-circumstances narratives; and Python, the cheeky tweaker of British Empire cultural conventions, used illusion, vulgarity, drag, and outrageous silliness to demolish all things staid and English. But their spirits are about to converge at the American Airlines Theatre in January, as the Olivier Award-winning stage version of Hitchcock's classic suspense thriller, The 39 Steps, adapted by Patrick Barlow, receives its Broadway debut.
The production team's conceit, devised by Barlow with director Maria Aitken, was to transfer the 1935 Hitchcock version of John Buchan's 1915 spy novel to the boards intact, including every scene, every special effect, and dozens of speaking parts. Yet to make the film-to-stage transfer, the show only employs a functional minimum of stage frou-frou and four actors who make lightning-quick changes of costumes, accents, and genders. The cinematic opulence of the source material, with its railway chase, spy planes, a London music hall, and the Scottish Highlands, is reduced and reimagined into viable theatrical terms. The performance style, while winking at the audience and making teasing references to some of the film conventions Hitchcock invented, serves up a quite faithful rendering of the original screenplay. “It's not meant to be a spoof,” says Barlow. “It really is genuinely trying to do the film onstage as well as possible.” Quick-witted Hitchcock buffs will be rewarded with fleeting references to Vertigo, North by Northwest, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and The Lady Vanishes. And yes, the Master makes one of his signature cameo appearances—but you'll have to look fast.
Baby Steps: A Literary Heritage
Very little of the original novel remains, but blame Hitchcock for that. The Scottish-born Buchan (1875-1940) was a true Renaissance man: a barrister, publisher, military officer, journalist, Governor-General of Canada, and the author of scores of works of fiction and nonfiction, including The Thirty-Nine Steps, written just as the First World War broke out. A spy novel before the form became a distinct genre, it follows suave Londoner Richard Hannay, freshly returned from Rhodesia, as he is pursued across Scotland, unwillingly carrying the secret of the 39 steps. In the novel, they are the steps from the villain's cliff-top lair to the sea at low tide.
What Hitchcock would call the MacGuffin (a plot device to motivate the characters but of no value in itself) in the novel is the guarded movements of the British fleet. Hannay, it could be argued, serves as the prototype for such modern spy heroes as James Bond and Jason Bourne. He is dashing, resourceful, with an unemotional exterior and complex interior. But the hero's journey in the novel is not very cinematic. Hannay takes on only one adversary at a time, for example, and, crucially, lacks a love interest. In fact, the book has no significant female character at all.
Next Steps: Alfred Hitchcock
When Gaumont Films staff director Alfred Hitchcock took on The 39 Steps (notice the subtle title change), he altered more than the name. He retained a) the character of Hannay, realized to perfection by actor Robert Donat, b) the pursuit across the Highlands, and c) practically nothing else. The phrase “39 steps” became the code name of the spy ring, and Buchan's unrelentingly somber narrative was replaced with a story line that had a picaresque, seriocomic tone and became full of memorable cameo characters who were hopping all over the British Isles (though the film is actually a cleverly disguised studio-bound assembly-line product).
The screen version literally linked Hannay to a classically cool Hitchcock blonde (played by Madeleine Carroll). For much of the second half the two are handcuffed together, leaving much to the imagination and titillating 1930s audiences to no end. In a typical Hitchcock touch, during filming he handcuffed Donat and Carroll together, then sauntered off the set. In the director's hands, Buchan's rather dry spy tale became a bracing, sexy comedy-adventure, emphasizing the innocent-man-on-the-run theme that would serve the director so well in movies like North by Northwest.
Steps Onstage: London
The film's most famous set pieces, like Hannay's daring escape off a train and onto the Forth Bridge, don't seem like practical stage material. In fact, when producer Edward Snape optioned the novel The Thirty-nine Steps, he had writers Nobby Dimon and Simon Corble stick mainly to Buchan's original. Enter Barlow, well known in England as an actor (Shakespeare in Love, Notting Hill), but better known as co-founder in 1980 of the National Theatre of Brent. The name is a joke in England, as Barlow says, because “Brent is this very awful suburb of London—it would be like saying the National Theatre of Canarsie.” Nevertheless, it's an actual theatre company, although a fanciful one, in which Barlow assumes the persona of Artistic Director and Chief Executive Desmond Olivier Dingle, a pompous, endearingly clueless aesthete and proponent of “The Theatah.” The company's specialty? Two-man versions of epics like The Charge of the Light Brigade and Wagner's Ring Cycle, relying on what he calls “the comedy of reduction.” It's not Pythonesque, precisely, but Barlow does cite the Python troupe as an influence, along with British vaudeville teams like Morecambe & Wise and cinema's silent clowns like Buster Keaton.
Approached by Snape about playing Hannay, Barlow declined, but he enthusiastically signed on to rewrite the Dimon-Corble script into a slightly enlarged, four-actor Theatre of Brent-ization of the Hitchcock film. He calls the original screenplay “so brilliant, with such sparkling '30s dialogue, that a lot of my work was already done. This may be apocryphal, but the story is that Hitchcock and his writer, Charles Bennett, wrote it while they sat in a little boat going up and down the Thames drinking champagne and eating smoked salmon. That's the way to write a movie. Unfortunately, Edward Snape didn't run to smoked salmon.” Barlow's challenge was to find theatrical equivalents of cinematic splendor, and to comment and joke on the “it's-only-a-movie-onstage” motif while fully respecting and believing in the source material.
Final Steps to Roundabout
It must have worked, because not only was The 39 Steps a major hit in London—it continues its run in London at the Criterion Theatre—but it won over Buchan's offspring. While the author claimed to be delighted with Hitchcock's work, one of his sons once said, he was “somewhat depressed” that so little of his novel made it to the screen. (A 1978 film version, starring Robert Powell, stuck closer to Buchan.) But, says Barlow, “A woman came up to me not long ago at the Criterion and said, ‘Congratulations, it's marvelous.' ‘Thanks,' I said. ‘My name's Lizzie Buchan,' she said, and I didn't get the connection. She said, ‘Buchan.' I said, ‘Oh, my God, you're a Buchan!' and got all panicky and jumpy. She was the grandson's wife. They all came, a big family, and they absolutely loved it. What a relief!”
For its pre-Broadway run at the Huntington Theatre Company in Boston, Barlow converted a few parochial British references into names Americans will more readily recognize—Berwick-upon-Tweed is now Wuthering Heights—but this version is 99.9 percent what the West End applauded. Barlow's not at all worried about Americans getting it. “We have loads of Americans in the West End, and they love it best of all—they're so much more demonstrative and less uptight than British audiences. I hang around the theatre sometimes, hoping to be accosted by some nice American tourists.”
Of course, Barlow will be in New York for The 39 Steps' Broadway opening at the American Airlines Theatre. He's also considering other Hitchcock properties to adapt. So if you have any notions of how to make Cary Grant dart across Mt. Rushmore onstage, Patrick Barlow would like a word with you..
Marc Miller is a copy chief at Business Week and writes frequently about the theatre.
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