39 STEPS by Asylum Theatre

“Eliminating the Impossible from The 39 Steps”

Reviewer: Gan Soon Rui
Performance: 8 May 2015

Following Asylum Theatre’s well received debut, Holiday in My Head last year, the company kick-starts its new season with another comedy, The 39 Steps.

Adapted by Patrick Barlow and based on an original four-actor concept by Simon Corbel and Nobby Dimon, The 39 Steps is a stage adaptation of both John Buchan’s 1915 novel, and Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 film of the same name.

The story follows the bumbling misadventures of Richard Hannay (played by Andrew Mowatt), a six-foot-one gentleman, with dark wavy hair, piercing blue eyes and a very attractive pencil moustache. As a result of the assassination on Annabella (played by Victoria Mintey), a foreign femme fatale he had met at a West End show, Hannay is forced to traverse across England to Scotland in order to escape arrest while finding the man that may stop the insidious plan set in motion by The 39 Steps.

The play is entirely self-reflexive and parodic in nature – one actor is required to play the protagonist Hannay while another actress play the role of the three women with whom he has romantic encounters. For the rest of the characters (and trust me, there are quite a number of them in the story), they are played interchangeably between two other actors.

Interestingly, director Dean Lundquist manages to up the ante, opting to compliment the comic effects through staging the play as a real “show” (a show within a show). Hannay, in this rendition, is supposedly played by a struggling actor-slash-owner of a small theatre company, the performance complete with a set of curtains with fraying patch works, and “economical” set design and effects.

While this layer was not explicitly performed, subtle displays of Lundquist’s influence show throughout the two hour long performance, much to the amusement of the audience.

In an oh-so-casual “oops” moment during the sequence in the train, Salesman 1 (played by Tim Garner) conveniently forgets to swap out the newsboy cap that he wore earlier as the Paperboy. This creates a deliberate and awkward pause between both Salesman 2 (played by Paul Lucas) and Hannay, subsequently forcing the latter to quietly break character and enlighten his colleague.

Hats off to Garner and Lucas, both of whom have the difficult task of changing between characters at the drop of the hat. Despite looking a little worse for wear towards the end of the performance, both actors perform consistently with superb comic timing and wonderful display of physical theatre, seamlessly playing off each other with impeccable coordination.

Suffice to say, this reviewer enjoy how the “show” is conscientiously bad and deliberately over-worked at dramatic segments in the performance, which make it reminiscent to some of the spy thrillers of days past, thus serving its purpose as a parody of sorts.

However improbable the chain of events in the plot, The 39 Steps still manages to woo over the audience with the cast’s physicality and humour.