Skip to main content

The 39 Steps


Ardler Community Centre, Dundee
Four stars

The BBC Scotland clock is ticking, the announcer is primed and the old-school microphones are switched very much on for the opening of Dundee Rep’s annual community tour. This year, in a spirit of familiarity as well as a neat twist on nostalgia, the ensemble company under the guidance of director Irene Macdougall renders Alfred Hitchcock’s cinematic reimagining of John Buchan’s classic ripping yarn as a 1930s live radio play. So, while Joe Landry’s ingeniously annotated version of the story focuses on the potentially world-changing fallout of upper-crust hero Richard Hannay’s flight from his London des-res after a female spy is murdered in his bedroom, such a novelty opens out a multitude of narrative layers.

The result in Macdougall’s meticulously observed production is what Hannay’s accidental nemesis turned love interest and saviour Pamela Stewart calls a “penny dreadful spy story” is a pukka romp that whisks the audience along a heady trail of international conspiracy in high places. Five actors led by Ewan Donald as Hannay and Emily Winter as Pamela move from high-speed trains to highland intrigue, with a big reveal coming courtesy of a music hall memory man on Leila Kalbassi’s pocket-sized set. With every line chiselled into shape to lead a listening audience with a visual reference, being able to witness the magic behind every door-slam, key-turn and simulated snog is a deconstructive delight.  

While by and large all this is played straight, with period mannerisms and actorly affectations to the fore, some knowing Mr Cholmondley-Warner style hamminess proves irresistible at points. Donald, Winter, Barrie Hunter, Ann Louise Ross and Billy Mack are clearly having a hoot. Crucially, they never undermine the fast-moving and deceptively complex plot that makes every moment an adventure.

The Herald, June 14th 2018

ends

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Maids

Dundee Rep

Two sisters sit in glass cases either side of the stage at the start of Eve Jamieson's production of Jean Genet's nasty little study of warped aspiration and abuse of power. Bathed in red light, the women look like artefacts in some cheap thrill waxworks horror-show, or else exhibits in a human zoo. Either way, they are both trapped, immortalised in a freak-show possibly of their own making.

Once the sisters come to life and drape themselves in the sumptuous bedroom of their absent mistress, they raid her bulging wardrobe to try on otherwise untouchable glad-rags and jewellery. As they do, the grotesque parody of the high-life they aspire to turns uglier by the second. When the Mistress returns, as played with daring abandon by Emily Winter as a glamour-chasing narcissist who gets her kicks from drooling over the criminal classes, you can't really blame the sisters for their fantasy of killing her.

Slabs of sound slice the air to punctuate each scene of Mart…
Post a Comment
Read more

Phoebe Waller-Bridge - Fleabag

Phoebe Waller-Bridge is a busy woman. The thirty-two year old actress who burst onto our TV screens as writer and star of Fleabag, the tragi-comic sort of sit-com about a supposedly independent woman on the verge is currently overseeing Killing Eve, her new TV drama which she's written for BBC America. As an actress, Waller-Bridge is also filming a big screen project which we can't talk about, but which has already been outed as being part of the ongoing Star Wars franchise.

These are both pretty good reasons why Waller-Bridge won't be appearing in the brief Edinburgh Festival Fringe revival of the original stage play of Fleabag, when it opens next week at the Underbelly, where it was first unleashed to the world in 2013. In her place, Maddie Rice will take on the role of the potty-mouthed anti-heroine after touring Vickie Jones' production for Waller-Bridge and Jones' DryWrite company in association with Soho Theatre. This doesn't mean Waller-Bridge has turned…
Post a Comment
Read more

The Divide

King's Theatre
Four stars

Everything is black and white in Alan Ayckbourn's new play, a six hour two part epic set in a dystopian future where men and women are segregated from each other following the aftermath of an unspecified plague. Into this landscape, the secret diaries of brother and sister Elihu and Soween are brought to life by Jake Davies and Erin Doherty with a wide-eyed lightness of touch as their hormones get the better of them when they both hit puberty.
Annabel Bolton's production for the Old Vic, EIF and Karl Sydow begins with a TED Talk type lecture that reveals the back story to how things turned out this way. It ends with a sentimental love story designed to tug the heart-strings. Inbetween, there is teenage rebellion aplenty against the regime's institutionalised repression. Liberation comes through art and sex, which, in such extreme circumstances become even greater life forces.

With both plays told through the siblings' diaries alongside ass…
Post a Comment
Read more