The 39 Steps
a Comedy by Patrick Barlow (from novel by John Buchan and movie by Alfred Hitchcock)
Presented by The Curtain Club
November 17 - December 02, 2023 at Curtain Club Theatre, Richmond Hill |
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| "The 39 Steps" is a melodrama adapted from the 1915 novel by John Buchan and the 1935 film by Alfred Hitchcock. The original concept and production of a four-actor version of the story was by Simon Corble and Nobby Dimon. Patrick Barlow rewrote this adaptation in 2005. The play's concept calls for the entirety of the 1935 adventure film "The 39 Steps" to be performed with a cast of only four. One actor plays the hero, Richard Hannay, an actress (or sometimes actor) plays the three women with whom he has romantic entanglements, and two other actors play every other 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 script is full of allusions to (and puns on the titles of) other Alfred Hitchcock films, including "Strangers on a Train", "Rear Window", "Psycho", "Vertigo" and "North by Northwest". |
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