Review of The 39 Steps at Hull Truck Theatre

Let us begin by attempting to define the genre into which The 39 Steps falls. Well, we can’t. There’s not just one. Because it’s a parody, a send-up, a pastiche. A drama, a comedy, a travesty of all that is sensible. It’s a melange of slapstick, musical, performance art and audience participation.

The performers (there are five in the cast) play around 100 separate roles, and their characters whirl around the stage like the ingredients in a Magimix blender turned up to full speed. It is a burlesque of a burlesque, with a lot of pantomime for good measure.

There’s a plot in there, but everything goes at such a pace that, by about ten minutes in, you give up caring, and let the whole lunatic business wash cheerfully over you.

It is very loosely based on a novel by John Buchan, who knew quite a bit about espionage and double-dealing, and is said to have inspired many of his succeeding writers in the same field. He was, if not the first to write about spies, one of the ones to pass on an impressive legacy.

Steps arrived as Britain was starting to wake up to a threat from across the Channel and was written to be entirely serious. A Mr Alfred Hitchcock got hold of the film rights, and turned it into one of the most successful of all pre-war movies.

This new(ish) version is a vague tribute to that account, and it does help (a little) if you are vaguely familiar with it. If you’re not, well, what the heck, it’s a spoof, a send-up, a couple of hours of malarkey that requires nothing more from the audience to have a darned good time. We are invited not so much to laugh at the piece itself, but the pre-war period in which it was all considered deadly serious.

Serious events are turned into an evening of skittishness, as adapted by Patrick Barlow, and directed by Cal McCrystal, whose flair for convulsive comedy is second to none. No cliché is left unturned, no opportunity for parody left unachieved, no send-up unsent.

How the cast keep up their collective energy levels will leave you pondering long after you have left the theatre. They are Sophie Bloor, James Keningale, Kathryn Perkins, Ryan Starling and Tom Mitchell, but listing who it is who plays what (or why) is a futile exercise. Mr Mitchell is also the understudy, and should he ever be obliged to step up to play someone indisposed, heaven help him.

It would be a grave error to omit the names of Mathew Clowes, who is billed as the Technical Manager (bless him), and the designer Jen McGinley, whose imaginative flair is breathtaking. It would have been relatively easy to attempt to dramatise Mr Buchan with reverence, but it’s far more fun to take a flying tackle at the fella, and to send him up summat rotten.

Fun, but not easy. Serious drama is the easy bit, comedy and side-splitting laughs are demanding work. This is the proof.

To November 14.