The 39 Steps in the West End review – barely puts a foot wrong

Watching the West End return of this award-winning crowdpleaser nearly two decades after the original opened for a nine-year run, one is inevitably struck by the feeling that The 39 Steps, with its pratfalls, artfully coarse acting, peculiarly English stiff upper lip sensibility, and unique combination of suspense, humour and genuine human feeling, is a natural precursor to current successes like Operation Mincemeat and the Mischief comedies.

Patrick Barlow’s adaptation and Maria Aitken’s staging (lovingly recreated here by Nicola Samer) owe more to the film adaptations (especially the Hitchcock) than to the 1915 John Buchan novel that first introduced Richard Hannay, the “poor little orphan boy who never had a chance” who becomes a man on the run up and down the UK. The stage distillation is deceptively clever in preserving the thriller-like tension of espionage, derring-do and murder, while simultaneously celebrating the comic joys of low-budget theatre-making where the epic ambition isn’t always matched by technical expertise.

It takes a lot of skill to make something look this hilariously ropey, and the show delights in the unashamedly theatrical, giving us puppetry, shadow play, drag, mistimed cues, moody lighting (courtesy of Ian Scott) cutting through swathes of dry ice, dodgy wigs and deafening sound effects. It’s inventive and often very silly, but it never sends up the story itself, only the more incredible methods of storytelling. The result is a piece of theatre that has audiences rolling in the aisles while still managing to wear its heart on its sleeve (even if that sleeve is about to be ripped off in yet another lightning-fast costume change).

As the play was always set specifically in the 1930s, it doesn’t seem to have aged much at all, but the hero Richard Hannay has a faux political speech about everybody pulling together to make life better that seems to hit with rather more emotional force in 2024 than it has done previously. This current iteration has further moved with the times in that the casting is no longer all white, and one of the athletic, shape-shifting clowns who play everything from police inspectors to garrulous lingerie salesmen to undergrowth on the Scottish Highlands (oh yes really) is now female. Maddie Rice is the epitome of somebody with ‘funny bones’ in this retuned role and she is wonderfully matched by her partner-in-comic-crime Eugene McCoy.

Tom Byrne invests tweed-wearing, pipe-smoking Hannay with shards of neurosis and vulnerability that feel like a departure from the work of some of his smoother predecessors in the role, but he is tremendously likeable. An equally winning Safeena Ladha deftly differentiates between a trio of potential romantic interests: gloriously funny but also rather touching.

If you were going to nitpick, one could argue that a couple of the physical choices the actors make, or have been directed to make, feel jarringly modern, and the execution of Toby Sedgwick’s often inspired movement direction could sometimes be crisper and sharper. Peter McKintosh’s bare stage set framed with plush red boxes and fake-gold proscenium arch still provides a sense of rough magic though, and the use of orchestral period film scores ranging from bombastic to whimsical remains wildly successful at setting tone and atmosphere.

This is a limited season at the end of a national tour but encountering the show again, it’s not hard to see why the original production spawned countless international stagings and a decent run on Broadway. It’s quirky, swift, ingenious and altogether a smashing hour and three quarters in the theatre. Really, The 39 Steps is the theatrical equivalent to comfort food: it’s tasty, nourishing, warming and a little bit indulgent…gosh it’s lovely to have it back.