The 39 Steps

GOING OUT ON A LIMB Edwards, right, inadvertently gropes Ferrin.

Photograph: Joan Marcus

People are constantly escaping in The 39 Steps, a spoofy stage version of the 1935 Alfred Hitchcock thriller. Our hero, Richard Hannay (Edwards), evades killer spies, the police and a diabolical German professor in this noir adventure. Escape is also pretty much all this amusing diversion—in which four actors play several dozen characters to bravura comic effect—offers the average theatergoer: about 100 minutes of chuckleworthy theatrical silliness that, while never hilarious, is thoroughly clever.

Centering on Hannay’s race to uncover the truth about something called “the 39 Steps,” the play whisks him from his flat in London to rural Scotland via train and back again for a climactic scene at the Palladium. Along the way, he encounters ridiculously thick accents from the land of plaid and bagpipes, as well as the lovely Pamela (Ferrin), a woman to whom he’s handcuffed for a night. Edwards, working each facial muscle into every permutation of smugness, confusion, shrewdness and panic, is perfectly charming in his mock-heroics. Arnie Burton and Cliff Saunders shine in several broad, quick-change supporting roles. Director Maria Aitken and adapter Patrick Barlow neatly translate the basic Fringe aesthetic of the piece—pantomime, metatheatrical gags and inventive use of props—into a more lavish production. Still, you can’t help wonder if the material would be funnier in a more intimate, scrappier version; then the laughs wouldn’t have to work so hard to escape the stuffy context.—David Cote