Review of The 39 Steps, adapted by Patrick Barlow
Parker & Snell Company
Gaiety Theatre 27th-29th November 2025
Reviewed by: Sarah Lockyer
This Olivier and Tony Award-winning 2005 adaptation of the novel by John Buchan is a parody of Alfred’s Hitchcock’s 1935 film. The play’s concept calls for the entirety of the spy story to be performed by a cast of only four, giving the tale a wonderfully comic twist.
The story sees the hero, Richard Hannay, a disaffected London gent, getting drawn into a deadly international conspiracy while attending a West End show, where he meets a mysterious woman. When she is murdered in his apartment, he has to flee to Scotland, evading the police and the gang that killed her. His final encounter with the mastermind behind the espionage takes place back in the same London theatre, with his new-found love interest by his side.
The Gaiety is the perfect venue for the play, with use made of the boxes and aisles, especially in the final scene set in Palladium. The mood is established by a wonderfully evocative score of 1930s music which also pays tribute to the silent film era. Costumes are spot on, from Hannay’s tweeds to a Scottish crofter’s smock, and a plethora of wigs and hats provides plenty of visual gags. Staging is deliberately sparse and theatrical, with plenty of fun involving curtains and bits of furniture that are dragged in to use as everything from a steam train to the Forth Bridge. Running jokes include a lamppost that has to be pulled on and off stage several times in one scene, and a door that is wheeled around as characters go in and out of houses. Shadow puppetry showing Hannay racing across the moors pursued by policemen and aeroplanes is ingenious and hilarious, and the famous chase scene on the top of a train is created simply by characters hopping across trunks and flapping their coats to simulate the wind.
It is the acting that makes this production such a tour de force. Richard Hannay is portrayed expertly by Carl Parker, whose manner, accent and bearing make for the perfect, if often perplexed, hero. He does have the luxury of playing just the one character, while Lisa Kreisky creates his three romantic interests marvellously, shifting from femme fatale to Highland lass to platinum blonde with aplomb. The other dozens of characters, male and female, fall to the two ‘clowns’: Ben Hynes and Dave Shaw. Quick changes of hats, coats and accents—often within the same scene— bring to life, among others, a cockney milkman, a Scotland Yard detective, a music hall emcee, a Bond-style villain, bumbling policemen and virtually unintelligible Scottish hotel owners. Their comic timing is superb, and their energy remarkable!
The audience were clearly captivated by the whole experience and laughed throughout this comic whirlwind of a production. It was certainly a thoroughly entertaining show.