I didn’t see this production of The Thirty-Nine Steps at The Criterion in 2006 but sent another reviewer.  It did go to New York where it was very well received and now I know why and regret missing it before. The play opens in a London Music Hall where  the debonair Richard Hannay (Tom Byrne) and a mysterious woman (Safeena Ladha) are in boxes watching Mr Memory’s act.  It is 1935 and in Europe, Hitler is re-arming Germany.

The woman Annabella Schmidt joins Hannay in his box as a shot is fired and says she is hiding from two men and asks to come home with him.  The woman’s acting style is highly melodramatic. At Hannay’s home she says that there are two men, under the lamp post, watching, and sure enough, as Hannay moves the blind, two men in raincoats and Fedoras come on stage left with the lamp post. 

What we are seeing is a highly physical, comic interpretation of Buchan’s adventure spy novel. I was laughing and laughing at the antics to get the two spies onstage and off stage, according to whether the blind was looked out of, or closed. 

Annabella is killed by a knife in her back but before she dies she mentions a place in Scotland, Alt-na-Shellach, a man called Professor Jordan and “the thirty nine steps”. Hannay decides to investigate himself but first he has to extricate himself out from under the woman’s dead body as she has died across his lap.