A Cloak & Dagger Comedy That Takes Some Smoke & Mirrors

A master of cinematic suspense, Alfred Hitchcock's trail-blazing The 39 Steps (1935), loosely adapted from the John Buchan novel of the same name, is oft cited as the birth of the thriller as we know it today.

Starring Robert Donat as Richard Hannay, an innocent man wrongly fingered for murderous treason after the assassination of an undercover spy, it featured cloak and dagger machinations by a mysterious organisation, an aerial pursuit and a daring train escape long before Sean Connery brought Ian Fleming's Bond to life.

But despite its revered cinematic creds, when Patrick Barlow's stage adaptation, directed by Jon Halpin, relocates from a smash hit run in Adelaide to Queensland Theatre's Cremorne, Brisbanites will experience a drama of a very different tone.

"They are two very different animals in their intent," chuckles Halpin, a stalwart of Brisbane's theatre scene. "The film was designed to thrill, though there was comedy in it, within the impossible dilemmas Hannay finds himself in. Whereas the play is taking all of that earnestness and turning it on its head and making it hilarious."

Much of that promised hilarity is wrought from four actors - Hugh Parker as Hannay, Liz Buchanan as the three female leads, including archetypal Hitchcock blonde Pamela, and Leon Cain and Bryan Probets as everyone else - portraying a whopping 139 characters with a low-fi array of props and make-shift on the hop scene changes.

"There's a thrill for the audience in that the play is moving faster than the actors can, so they are constantly a beat behind the action, the prop isn't there or their costume isn't quite right or they've chosen the wrong accent for this character," Halpin laughs. "All of these are quite deliberate in reality, but to the audience they are hilarious accidents."

Barlow's re-tooling of the book-turned-classic movie also upends a celebrated Hitchcock tradition in the red herring MacGuffin. "Which in the movie is the 39 Steps," Halpin notes. "It doesn't really matter what that is, but that's what Hannay has to find out in order to relieve himself of this terror. The real story is the love story between Hannay and Pamela and how they end up together."

"People are with Hannay for that journey when he's the pursued man. That thrill still lives through the nonsense and that's a tribute to the genius of Hitchcock."

In this frenetic stage re-telling, it's this unlikely romance, with Pamela portrayed by Madeleine Carroll in the movie, that fulfils this function. "The love story is the MacGuffin in order to get to this ridiculous series of attempts at action sequences," Halpin says. "Barlow has taken that concept but inverted it for comic realisation. The love story is still there and we play it as truthfully as we can, but it's a little oasis of calm in amongst this chaos and ridiculousness that happens all around it."

Production Designer Ailsa Paterson has had to come up with some particularly ingenious ways to recreate Hannay's flight from London to the Scottish highlands in a way that the teeny four-strong cast can conjure from a small revolving set, a plethora of props, smart light and sound design from David Murray and Stuart Day respectively and a whole lot of enthusiastically encouraged imagination.

"We're really embracing those tricks where you see the mechanics of it but through a little bit of theatre sleight of hand we can create quite magical effects with very little technical work," Paterson says. "People come in not quite realising that it's a farcical version of Hitchcock and then suddenly realise that a cast of four are playing over 100 characters and it's a very fun piece."

Perhaps the most visually arresting moment in Hitchcock's adaptation is Hannay evading police capture by fleeing from a train and hiding outside, clinging to the hulking red-painted steel structure of the Forth Bridge. While the filmmaker shot some location work, his set designers recreated part of the Scottish landmark in the studio for that memorable close-up.

Paterson's take is a little more low-fi, particularly given the Cremorne is a good bit smaller again than Adelaide's Playhouse, ruling out scenery fly cues. "The premise is that Hannay has been redecorating his apartment, so the stage is going to be littered with a lot of stacked up furniture covered in drop sheets," she reveals. "So two A-form ladders will have a third straight ladder spanning them, and that becomes the Forth Bridge structure. We'll get some haze going quickly while Hugh hangs from that."

Fun physical theatre ensues, with Patterson heavily involved in the rehearsal room, plotting out the show's many swift changes, but always with a flexible outlook deferring to the cast. "Part of the challenge has been designing a set that provides solutions for all of these scenes but allows the actors to devise a lot in the rehearsal room. It's very important they have the freedom to create from that playground."

Stoked to have been asked to re-cast the show with a dream Brisbane theatre line-up, and Halpin waxes lyrical about all four, the director says that he's just as excited staging The 39 Steps second time around. For all Barlow's humorous tinkering, a Hitchcockian core remains.

"You see very radical interpretations of Shakespeare, but the core of those plays can't be broken," he says. "They can withstand a lot of tinkering and similarly with this play. There's still a thrill for the audience and gasps when the reveals happen. People are with Hannay for that journey when he's the pursued man. That thrill still lives through the nonsense and that's a tribute to the genius of Hitchcock, and to the cleverness of Patrick Barlow."

Queensland Theatre presents The 39 Steps from 24 Feb at Cremorne Theatre.