The 39 Steps

Published Wednesday 23 January 2008 at 16:15 by John Thaxter

Two thugs with turned-up collars lurk under a lamp in the street outside. Meanwhile in Richard Hannay’s Portland Place apartment, a glamorous German agent lies sprawled across an armchair with a knife in her back.

This can only be the starting point of John Buchan’s famous thriller. But no, this is a theatrically inventive spoof reconstruction of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 movie version, complete with a chase on the Flying Scotsman and a Highlands love story for our debonair colonial hero, linked to a svelte blonde by police handcuffs.

Patrick Barlow’s four-hander, with an apparent cast of hundreds, began life at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, reaching its apogee in 2006 in a new production at the Tricycle. Now, while the West End transfer plays to packed houses, the show has received rave reviews on Broadway and is currently touring in spin-off productions around the world.

On the third leg of the UK tour, the Richmond audience was clearly having a great time, responding to the theatrical panache of a brilliantly drilled cast - although as an old hand for this show I found the Scottish castle sequence now slightly lacking erotic menace, and at key moments Mic Pool’s superb sound design was a tad over-reverberant.

Square-jawed David Michaels’ Hannay is every bit as virile and handsome as his predecessor, while slender Clare Swinburne gives a performance of starry versatility as a husky-voiced spy, wistful crofter’s wife, and delicious romantic comedy as blonde bombshell Pamela, the unwilling heroine. But generating most of the laughter are Colin Mace and Alan Perrin, who play all the other roles with split-second changes of costume and voice to dazzling comic effect.