The 39 Steps

Richard Hannay the handsome and well-off middle-aged batchelor lives a quite dull life in London until he meets an extremely attractive young woman and gets in the middle of a terrifying crime story by accident...

 

The 39 Steps is a melodrama adapted from the 1915 novel by John Buchan and the 1935 film by Alfred Hitchcock. Patrick Barlow's adaptation written in 2005 was a box office success in London and since then it has been played in theatres all over the world.

The play's concept is that the original story is performed with a cast of only four. One actor plays the hero, Richard Hannay, an actress plays the three women with whom he has romantic entanglements, and two other actors play every other (26!) character in the show: heroes, villains, men, women, children and even the occasional inanimate object. This often requires lightning fast quick-changes and occasionally for them to play multiple characters at once. Thus the film's serious spy story is played mainly for laughs, and the play becomes an entertaining crime comedy.