Ted Deasy as Richard Hannay and Eric Hissom in one of his many roles in ‘Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps’The best spoofs laugh with their subjects, not at them. Zucker, Abrahams, & Zucker obviously had a great love for the campy pleasures of disaster movies and the unintended humor of Zero Hour! when they made Airplane!, and Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg’s adoration of zombie cinema is apparent in every frame of Shaun of the Dead. In that same vein comes Patrick Barlow’s stage adaptation of Alfred Hitchcock’s popular 1935 thriller, which is as reverential to the source material — and to Hitch himself — as it is completely silly.
Hitchcock’s film, the first of four filmed adaptations of a WWI-era John Buchan adventure novel, was one of the first of the director’s many innocent-man-on-the-run movies, about suave Londoner Richard Hannay (Ted Deasy) who is wrongly accused of murder when he chances to put up an attractive secret agent for the night. The film proves to be remarkably fertile ground for comedy. That’s not too much of a surprise, as Hitchcock’s dry wit was as apparent as ever in this early work. In fact, much as was the case with the relationship between Zero Hour! and Airplane, the stage version of The 39 Steps is able to lift entire segments of dialogue from the original and reuse them, nearly untouched, in the adaptation, tweaking the delivery just enough to work them for big laughs.
That delivery usually involves a not-so-subtle wink wink, nudge nudge, say-no-more awareness on the part of the actors of everything they’re doing. There’s no pretense of a fourth wall here: the cast looks freely at the audience, and acknowledges and plays with the fact that they are four people playing a cast of over a dozen. The skilled Eric Hissom and Scott Parkinson often portray two and three characters within the same scene via costume and hat changes of nearly acrobatic dexterity. At one point, as the characters are instructed to board a car, all four look in confusion around at a stage with no such prop. They immediately begin scrambling to rearrange the four chairs onstage from the previous scene into a car-like configuration, tipping over a lectern to serve as an impromptu steering column.
