Alfred Hitchcock arguably remains Britain’s most famous film director. In a career making over 50 films, he earned himself the moniker “the master of suspense”. While movies such as Psycho (1960), Vertigo (1958) and Rear Window (1954) are bona fide classics of the cinema in their own right, Hitchcock developed and excelled certain movie tropes. Throughout his career, we see Hitch exploring an innocent man wrongly accused of a crime in film after film. While North by Northwest (1959), Saboteur (1942) and The Wrong Man (1956) all utilise this theme, it is with 1935’s The 39 Steps that sees the British director toying most playfully with this trope. Remarkably, the film manages to offer a web of intrigue while imbuing it with farce, slapstick and wickedly mischievous humour.
It is such a blend that adapter Patrick Barlow takes as the starting point of his 2005 stage adaptation – and ramps it up to a wild degree. Set in London 1935, it sees Richard Hannay, our hapless upper-crust hero, in his Portland Place flat, bored at the pointlessness of his life. No chance of being eaten by crocodiles in the Limpopo for him. Taking himself for a routine night at the theatre, he finds himself accidentally embroiled in international intrigue when a mystery German femme fatale fires a gun causing chaos in the theatre. Persuading Hannay to take her back to his flat, she reveals herself to be Annabella Schmidt and that she created the diversion to avoid assassins who were after her. Claiming to have uncovered a nefarious plot to take vital British military secrets out of the country, she warns of a criminal mastermind behind the plot who can be recognised by the missing top joint of his pinkie finger. Referencing but not explaining the phrase “The 39 Steps”, the glamorous blonde is found murdered by morning with the blame falling on Hannay. Relying on the dead woman’s map of the Scottish Highlands, he goes on the run from the police, heading to the circled location of Alt-na-Shellach to clear his name…