THE THIRTY-NINE STEPS
adapted from the Alfred Hitchcock film, to be performed from 1st – 15th September 2018, directed by Lyn Harnwell.
Auditions will be held Sunday 13th May from 4pm and Monday 14th May from 7:30pm at the Players Theatre, Bomaderry.
John Buchan wrote the book just before World War 1. It has been called the first ‘thriller’, – a story of a man fleeing injustice and evading capture in all sorts of ways, to save the country from treachery. Hitchcock’s black and white film of 1935 is reckoned to be one of his best works. It captures the hero’s various encounters and escapes to save Britain from disaster.
First presented in 1995 and subsequently going on to wow audiences in London and Broadway, this version draws on both the above to create a crazily funny and fast paced drama traversing the length and breadth of the British Isles. Patrick Barlow, the adapter writes “ One of the thrilling things about writing this was the challenge of putting an entire movie on the stage – complete with train chases, plane crashes, shadowy murders, beautiful spies, trilbied heavies, dastardly villains….not to mention some of the most iconic moments in the history of the cinema….but it is also a love story. A man and a woman, miraculously through all the daredevil fears and derring-do, discover the beating of their own true hearts, and above all a reason to look after each other and the world.”
So a great challenge awaits us. This piece is played on a bare stage – well almost bare – and the action and the setting are conveyed by a few props, the actors’ actions and a bit of magic! Very much physical theatre and ensemble acting.
The cast consists of Richard Hannay, the hero, who is a thoroughly decent and jolly nice chap, just back from the colonies and alone in a rented flat in London, who decides to do something mindless and trivial to while away a lonely evening. He goes to the Music Hall! There he meets Annabel, the foreign beauty who warns him to be “verree careful” and then disappears. The female actress also plays Pamela, an equally beautiful English rose, upper middle class and resourceful as well as Margaret, the brave Scottish crofter’s daughter. Clown 1 and Clown 2 play an estimated 250 characters, ranging from Music Hall artistes, paper boys, policemen, sinister villains, pilots, Scottish crofter, an enigmatic villain, an upperclass lady and so on and so on. there is great opportunity here for a chance to have fun creating the personas.
