As a self-professed cinephile, when I was assigned to review an adaptation of Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps, the kick-off to Gladstone Theatre’s 2011-12 season, I walked into the Sept. 7 performance with certain expectations: of murder, mystery and intrigue cloaked in high-contrast lighting and English accents.
I am happy to report that I was not disappointed — The 39 Steps delivers these — but nor did I expect a meagre cast of four, a dazzling display of comedic timing, superb character acting and to spend the majority of the performance choking back laughter.
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The 39 Steps |
What I wasn’t aware of was that this particular adaption of Hitchcock’s 1935 yarn about Richard Hannay — a Canadian bored to death with his tiny London flat and isolated modern existence who is launched into a realm of international espionage after meeting an attractive woman at the theatre and waking to find her dead in his apartment — is a parody of the film, which is based in turn on a novel by John Buchan, who, as Lord Tweedsmuir, was a Governor-General of Canada. The play, which premiered in Leeds, England in 2005, casts only four actors in the nearly 100 roles found in the film version, which starred Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll.
The Gladstone production, directed by John P. Kelly, features locals AL Connors as Richard Hannay, the jaded playboy cast into the role of unlikely hero, Kate Smith as his romantic interests (plural), and Richard Gélinas and Zach Counsil as, well, everybody else.
I can’t speak highly enough of the talent contained in this minuscule cast. Connors plays Hannay with all of the easy suaveness required to make the character’s innumerable romantic conquests and death-defying escapes believable (aided, no doubt, by his dashing pencil moustache) and Smith alternatingly oozes sex appeal and a naive earnestness as his string of leading ladies — a German spy, a shepherd’s daughter, and his unwilling partner-in-perceived-crime, Pamela. But the show is stolen time and time again by Counsil and Gélinas, who together play stage actors, spies, police officers, train conductors, newspaper boys, husbands, wives, children . . . as well as airplanes, birds and sheep.
Apart from their spot-on comedic timing, seemingly bottomless repertoire of accents and ability to physically inhabit their characters, what was most admirable about their performance was their ability to quick-change from character to character, sometimes in a matter of seconds. (One particularly rip-roaring scene features the two simultaneously playing at least three characters each, differentiated only by the hats they wear).
The 39 Steps is delightfully self-aware, consistently breaking through the metaphorical fourth wall, with the characters making constant references to the play’s source material, as well as other Hitchcock oeuvres, and playfully berating the stage technicians, crew and one-another for on-stage slip-ups that I strongly suspect were played for laughs. (At one point Connors and Smith paused a long-awaited romantic revelation to waggle their fingers at an audience member whose cell phone had gone off).
A simple set that requires manual re-setting by the actors adds to the farce, with spies lurking beneath a London streetlamp (Gélinas and Counsil) toting their own lamp, and a German professor’s wife (Counsil) spinning a doorframe around and around to denote the passage from one room to the next. The relative simplicity of the set (barring the huge assortment of props and costumes required to create so many different towns and characters) only serves to highlight the cast’s energy and range.
The 39 Steps will play at the Gladstone Theatre at 910 Gladstone Ave. until Sept. 24. The 2011-12 season will continue with Speed-The-Plow in October.