Seattle Repertory’s season opener, “Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps,” isn’t really much like the 1935 spy thriller.
It’s more the dim memory you likely have of the film years ago from a merry late night screening that capped off a bar crawl.
The camp send-up by this busy touring cast of four lifts the film script quite faithfully in most respects, including its tweedy dialogue. But oh, how goofily they play it, and the result may not be much of a thriller, but it is thrilling.
Ted Deasy is the hero Richard Hannay, a professorial drifter with Harris wool suit and pipe who becomes ensnared in an international espionage ring. Claire Brownell plays most of the long-term female roles, including the femme fatale whose murder by skulking enemies in Richard’s bachelor apartment sets him on the run from the police.
Yet it’s Eric Hissom and Scott Parkinson, the remaining two cast members, who shoulder most of the 150 roles, brilliantly switching hats, accents, and pants for skirts to keep the story moving.
Hitchcock’s early effort seems quite ripe for mockery today, with its stagey acting and oh-so-British veneer of manners even as guns point. While it remains a landmark for Hitch’s emerging cinematic vocabulary (merging the landlady’s scream with the blast of the train whistle, for example), the story itself feels overwrought to modern viewers.
Which is why adaptor Patrick Barlow sticks so close to the screenplay; it doesn’t take much invention to turn it absurd.
That doesn’t restrain the cast from playing up the melodrama, though. Instead of the fragile aristocrat that comes to Richard for help, Brownell slinks as a Russian agent, milking her hard consonants for laughs and playing up seduction for laughs (“do you want to be in-WOL-ved?”).
And so Richard launches on his journey to Scotland, with the actors waving their jackets to indicate wind and rocking on their heels to suggest the motion of the train. Hissom and Parkinson offer virtuoso turns as they trade off the duties of making everything happen around him. Brownell reappears as the love interest, Pamela, who refuses to believe Richard is just trying to save the British empire.
Everything is offered with a giant wink as the pastiche blooms into total silliness, devolving into the kind of raucous music hall where the story opens and closes. Bad puns and references to Hitchcock’s later film titles positively litter the stage by the time we’re done. It’s all over the top (sometimes too much so) and charmingly spirited.
One effect of all this lunacy is to make evident how comic by design Hitchcock’s film really was. The vaudeville jokes are preserved here (“Are you married?” “Don’t rub it in!”), and feel completely at home. So much of the movie relied on the nudging portrayal of especially English types such as the class-deferential police, the penny-pinching farmer and the rabid socialist politics of Scotsmen.
But that would be thinking about, something that “The 39 Steps” doesn’t demand. It only asks to be seen and enjoyed.
“Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps” runs through Oct. 24 at Seattle Repertory Theater at Seattle Center. Tickets: $15-$59 ($12 under 25 with ID); (206) 443-2222 or www.seattlerep.org.
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