Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *

Cast: Danielle Bird, Mei Mei MacLeod, Mateo Oxley, Phil Yarrow, Charlotte Bloomsbury.

The fast and the curious are given their true sense of exhilaration and thrills in the sublime Patrick Barlow adaption of the John Buchan novel, The 39 Steps, and in dramatic fashion the brilliance of farce and the sheer genius of buffoonery is once more aligned with the stars and the conceit of the spy story is shown for the creativity that the production deserves.

Just how the play can keep pace with itself is always an interesting question, it is one that asks, quite rightly, that the audience is alert to every flourish, every quick change of character, setting, and clothes, and whilst the original book, and the several adaptions for the cinema, almost perfected by the master of suspense in Alfred Hitchcock’s own detailed 1935 black and white film which starred the elegant Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll pairing, have always been of the serious nature that the book demands, the sheer cool in which Patrick Barlow’s stage version subverts the drama and brings out the repressed laughter is the essence of purity in a theatrical setting.

It is in this that the pacing succeeds, and for the four actors on stage, Danielle Bird, Mei Mei MacLeod, Mateo Oxley, and Phil Yarrow are put through their own paces, the quick change, the alteration of demeanour as each character demands their moment in thrusting the exposition of the story onwards…this is theatre at its very best, and farce at its most constructive.

Much must be said of the way that the stage design and scene changes played its part in the way that the play was perceived, and with the raking nature of the seating looking down upon the theatre’s platform, what the audience were offered was the delicious aspect of illusion, a mirror to the play’s own heart.

The foursome on stage, under the dedicated direction of Ryan McBryde, push themselves to very limits of comedy’s artistic eccentricity, never once overstepping the line in which farce becomes a charade, a forced travesty, instead it abounds with glee at some of its more surreal moments, and the Salisbury audience appreciating the response with positive pleasure.

A moment of theatre that captures the essence of comedy with admiration and genuine pleasure; The 39 Steps is a mystery revealed and relished.

Ian D. Hall