Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps: A Review

Alfred Hitchcock is one of the greatest, maybe arguably the greatest, filmmakers of all time. Monty Python is a comedic genius. The play The 39 Steps brilliantly combines the two. Two of these are true, one is not false.

(get it?)


So a friend told me about the play, The 39 Steps, which she saw in New York City. When I found out is was touring, and coming to The Majestic in Dallas, I snatched up some tickets! Wonderful decision. As their site describes, “Mix a Hitchcock masterpiece with a juicy spy novel, add a dash of Monty Python and you have THE 39 STEPS, a fast-paced whodunit for anyone who loves the magic of theatre!”

This is a perfect description. It is thrilling, mysterious, fast-paced, and absolutely hilarious!

The plot is essentially the same between the film and the play. Richard Hannay is a Canadian in London, goes to a show entitled “Mr. Memory” one night and meets a girl on the run. He agrees to help her by letting her stay in his apartment for the night, where she rambles about a man missing part of his pinky, and a group (The 39 Steps). She is killed that same night and Hannay is forced to go on the run as the prime murder suspect. While on the run he makes his way to Scotland to find out what is going on with this mysterious 39 Steps in order to prove his innocence.

What’s interesting about the play, and which I think is an important concept to address about the theater, is how it constantly reinforces to its audience that they are watching a play. One of the ideas I’ve learned in school is described in the book Remediation by Bolter & Grusin, and it’s the idea of immediacy vs. hypermediacy. Immediacy is best characterized by arguments about developing virtual reality, that there will be a moment when the viewer forgets that they are viewing media, and thus it is the best experience because they are completely immersed in the media. Hypermediacy is the opposite of that. It is when the viewer is completely aware of what they are experiencing in media. A football game, or any televised sport is a good example of this. There you are bombarded by reminders that you’re watching TV, through the announcers, the text rolling by about other games, the scoreboard, the timer clock, the replays, etc. Now, Bolter and Grusin argue in the book that there is never a moment of media where neither immediacy or hypermediacy exists. There is always both working together, in other words.

The hypermediacy of The 39 Steps, is much clearer to spot than the immediacy. Plays in general are difficult to experience without the awareness that you’re watching a play. It’s hard to hide the stage and the lights, the moving of props, and all the elements of theater. Still though, plays try to hide these things. They dim the lights so that you don’t see the moving of props, or they have curtains hiding the backstage. Not so in the case of The 39 Steps. Here there are four actors total. They do things like change a hat on stage to change into another character. They wheel around a mobile-door to show that they are moving through a house. They make no effort to hide that they have to move props, even sometimes making a joke out of it. And it’s hilarious! Sometimes it seems as though the actors are doing this for the first time and there are mistakes made. And even though in the back of the mind, you’re pretty sure that they’ve rehearsed these mistakes and they are not in fact happenstance, you still laugh at them fumbling around with props and hats. There are other moments in the play when the actors draw attention to the limitations of the stage. Such a moment occurs when there is a chase on a train. Clearly a fast moving train can not be brought out onto the stage for many reasons. To compensate for this the actors run and stumble and balance themselves as if they are on a train, even going to the effort to shake their coats behind them and hold their hats on their head, as if they were actually blowing in the wind atop the moving train. This is a kind of Monty-Python-type-humor as well, much like the horsemen in The Holy Grail who clap coconuts together to imitate the sound of horse hooves galloping, probably to save cost on renting real horses in the film, and to get a laugh.

This hypermediated theater experience is great-fun, and they manage to pay tribute to a great filmmaker, Alfred Hitchcock, and also create a unique experience only possible in the theater. It is a play that can only work as a play. This could never be a movie, because the humor lies in the fact that it is a play, you are in the balcony of an old theater, staring down at four actors running around on a stage having a grand old time. So don’t get excited for a film version, just find out where The 39 Steps is playing near you and get your butt to the theater!