Minimal cast and props deliver dynamic theatre in The 39 Steps playing at the Papermill Playhouse in Toronto
The 39 Steps was a novel, then a Hitchcock thriller, and is now — nearly a century after it appeared — presented in Real-Life-O-Vision at the Papermill Playhouse. The modern staging was pioneered on a barnstorming tour of British town halls and corn exchanges: four actors play all the roles, using only a few crates, hats, set pieces and pairs of stockings between them.
This kooky melodrama is very much set in a specific time and place: England, during the interwar years, when mentalists still played the music halls and a weekend in Scotland was an exotic vacation. As the characters travel up and down the country hunting the Great MacGuffin, they encounter great complications and smaller dramas: sheep on the road, romantic entangelements, a Scottish pipe band, and fear and danger around every corner. Will our hero succeed?
Of course he will. It’s an interwar melodrama; it wouldn’t do to have a sad ending. So let’s stop talking about the plot and move onto the meat.
