Sydney Reviews

A night of Buchan good fun, The 39 Steps is a fabulous realisation of a bona fide classic book that became a certifiably classic film given spectacular birth as a stage play, assured to claim classic, if not cult, stature in its own write.

The first of the Richard Hannay tales penned by John Buchan and famously transferred to celluloid by Alfred Hitchcock, the novel was a very well shaped thriller with vertiginous shifts of plot and scene.

The thrills in this production are made to rib tickle rather than spine chill and the vertiginous shifts of plot and scene are employed to great comic effect.

Like Hitchcock’s film, the play is set in 1935, not the 1915 of the novel, and has Richard Hannay appropriately ten years older, but no less the innocent bystander thrust into international intrigue.

The high stakes of the espionage saga are hijacked by high jinks in this production adapted by Patrick Barlow from an original concept by Simon Corble and Nobby Dimon and the cast luxuriate in the lush theatrics of the piece.

The two leads, Ian Stenlake as Richard Hannay and Lisa McCune as Mary and Margaret are very good, with accomplished comic acumen, but it is the comedic virtuosity of The Umbilical Brothers, David Collins and Shane Dundas that take The 39 Steps on a stairway to farcical, frantic antic heaven.

Sublime mime, self generated sound effects, quick changes, dead pan elan all contribute to a cavalcade of craziness.

Visually stunning, The 39 Steps set and costumes by James Browne and lighting design by Matthew Marshall is a feast, big, iconic, geometrical, all done with a greyscale colour palette. We are whisked from apartments to mansions, train compartments to bicycle tracks, aerial attacks and hotel rooms with remarkable finesse.

Scrim and shadow work is excellent and Brady Watkins’ sound design and composition evoke mystery and mirth in equal measure.

Directed with a zany zest by Damien Ryan, The 39 Steps is chock full of Hitchcock and Hollywood references and Easter eggs, unabashed silliness and precision performance. Step up.