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by Patrick Barlow, directed by Ravi Jain

Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto

August 3-September 3, 2016

Pamela: “What is the point of all this?”

Patrick Barlow’s play The 39 Steps ran from 2006 to 2015 in London’s West End and in 2007 won the Oliver Award for Best New Comedy.  It is a tour de force for an acting company since it requires four actors to play over 130 roles as they recreate Alfred Hitchcock’s famed 1935 spy film on stage.  The original production directed by Maria Aitkin was both exciting and hilariously funny.  Soulpepper’s current production directed by Ravi Jain is not.  Whereas Aitken used mime and frenetic quick changes to tell the story, Jain uses the story merely as an excuse for a series of clownesque routines that destroy the pacing and ruin the storytelling. 

A few facts make the difference between Jain’s version and Aitkin’s quite clear.  Hitchcock’s film runs an hour and 26 minutes.  Aitken’s production ran one hour and 45 minutes which included a 15 minute intermission.  That means that under Aitkin the stage version, amazingly, was only four minutes longer than the film.  Jain’s version, however, runs two hours and 20 minutes including a 20-minute intermission.  It is thus a full 30 minutes longer than the West End production.  If the Soulpepper production seems baggy and slow, it is because the half hour of would-be comic shtick that Jain has added has bogged down what should be a quick, slick romp and made it a laboured display of self-indulgence.

Hitchcock’s film is based on a 1915 novel of the same name by Scotsman John Buchan, a politician who, by the way, served as Governor General of Canada from 1935 to 1940.  Hitchcock’s film that Barlow follows closely, updates Buchan’s pre-World War I setting to pre-World War II and changes the novel’s hero, Richard Hannay, from a South African citizen to a Canadian.  In the play, as in the film and the novel, a mysterious young woman in fear for her life accompanies Hannay back to his flat in London after a visit to the theatre.  She tells Hannay that Britain will be doomed unless someone can stop secret information from leaving the country.  All she can tell Hannay it that is has to do with something called “The 39 Steps” and that the secret is in Scotland at a place called “Alt-na-Shellach”.  When the woman is murdered in his apartment in the middle of the night, Hannay, fearing he will be accused of the murder, flees to Scotland to solve the mystery of “The 39 Steps”, complete the woman’s assignment and thereby clear his name. 

Act 1 of the Soulpepper production is far better than Act 2 because it at least makes some pretence of using a wide range of theatrical means to tell a story.  The first sign things will not go well after the overdone cellphone comes when the mysterious woman asks Hannay to open the Venetian blinds and he fumbles for several minutes trying to do so.  The 39 Steps is supposed to be tension-filled spy caper, but this fumbling with the blinds is a pointless gag in itself and attracts attention away from the storytelling. 

So it is with all subsequent gags that Jain adds to the play.  The crofter who is unreasonably jealous of his wife is meant to add a sense of danger.  To make him cross-eyed, as here, and prone to bumping into things dispels that atmosphere.  Jain adds a long, tedious business about the two men in charge of a political meeting who mistake Hannay as their guest speaker.  The minutes wasted in demonstrating that they are decrepit and in having one of them give an inaudible speech of introduction completely stop what little momentum the story had had.  When two spies disguised as policemen kidnap Hannay and Englishwoman Pamela from the meeting, Jain has the actors make a fuss in showing us how they use the lectern, chairs and footlights to turn whatever is at hand into an automobile.  The fun of the show, however, is that the cast has been using makeshift props all through the action without calling attention to it or seeking the audience’s applause for it.  So why waste time on it now?

Act 2 descends into even longer added routines that each time stop the show dead.  When Hannay and Pamela check into an out-of-way hotel to evade their would-be kidnappers, Jain has the actors playing playing the folksy couple who run the hotel launch into a bizarrely extended routine involving much ringing of the reception bell and barely audible conversations between the two. 

In particular, Jain allows actor Anand Rajaram far too much latitude in his improvisations.  In one Rajaram returns for no known reason as Hannay’s cleaning lady in the theatre setting where she forces the audience into a singalong.  It’s totally unnecessary, unfunny and makes clear, as if we hadn’t already guessed that Jain really isn’t all that interested in telling the story.  Near the end, Jain allows Rajaram as the villain, Professor Jordan, an excruciatingly laboured death scene that passes from mildly amusing to extremely tedious in just a few seconds after which it keeps going on and on.

Kawa Ada makes a fine Richard Hannay.  He exudes the right world-weariness at the beginning and does just the right transformation of ordinary fellow into a hero without knowing it that has made the character so enjoyable for a hundred years.  Ada is also a master of physical and verbal comedy.  His ability to contort himself to fit the Scottish box bed is quite surprising and he masterfully delivers Hannay’s political speech that rises from not having a clue what to say to patriotic fervour in just a few minutes.  As the only actor to play only one role, it is a blessing that Jain has allowed him to play Hannay without a load of extraneous gags.  He also looks great in a pencil moustache. 

Raquel Duffy shows her gift for comedy once again in radically distinguishing her three major roles.  She is suitably sensuous and mysterious as the spy Annabella Smith, who speaks in an unplaceable Russo-German accent, though her frequent twirling movements are unneeded.  Duffy injects a few moments of real sentiment into the role of the unhappy crofter’s wife Margaret, who longs after life in a big city.  And she is perfect as the disdainful, uptight Englishwoman Pamela, who fights with Hannay even when they are handcuffed together, until she realizes much later that he is telling the truth. 

Andrew Shaver and Anand Rajaram are the two actors known as Clown 1 and Clown 2, who play all the other roles.  Shaver is especially funny as the geeky performer Mr. Memory and as Professor Jordan’s libidinous wife, although the role is spoiled by a prolonged routine of going through the same door innumerable times.  Rajaram is probably best as the boisterous promoter of Mr. Memory and as the subtly deceitful sheriff Hannay goes to for help.  Otherwise, Rajaram’s tendency is to go way over the top.  It’s hard to know what precisely he’s doing as the evil Professor Jordan – some sort of unsuccessful mixture of Ernst Blofeld and Dr. Strangelove, it seems.  Rajaram puts on a number of different Scots accents but most of them render his lines incomprehensible.

While the individual performances may vary in quality, the four do work well together as an ensemble, as when two police inspectors (Shaver and Rajaram) come upon Hannay and Pamela in a railway compartment, or when two thugs (Shaver and Rajaram) lose Hannay in a parade (played by Duffy) or when the thugs drive off with Pamela and Hannay in a car. 

The original production had the virtue of both sending up the spy story it was telling while still involving us in it.  Similarly, the requirement of presenting a motion picture thriller on stage with only four actors, no set and an inventive use of props was at once humorously incongruous and brilliantly successful.  By adding a half hour of unnecessary material, presumably to make the already comic story funnier (always a bad policy), Jain has ruined the show’s pacing as a thriller and relegated the storytelling to a simple clothesline for a series of hit and miss routines. 

Those who saw the original production in London or New York, will find the Soulpepper production vastly disappointing.  Those who have never seen that production might well wonder why there was so much fuss over what seems to be an incredibly silly and fairly pointless play.  That’s the attitude, I assume, of the couples on either side of me who didn’t laugh once during the entire evening.  Until a better production of this show comes along – and regional theatres in Ontario have already started to stage it –  it would be best just to rent or download the classic film and enjoy one of Hitchcock’s first masterpieces.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: (from top) Kawa Ada, Anand Rajaram, Andrew Shaver and Raquel Duffy; Raquel Duffy as Annabella and Kawa Ada as Richard Hannay; Andrew Shaver as Mr. memory and Anand Rajaram. ©2016 Cylla von Tiedemann.

For tickets, visit www1.soulpepper.ca.