From Boy's Own Thriller To Farcical Comedy In Just 39 Steps
The Age
Monday January 19, 2009
Steve Dow meets the British actor who found a calling as a playwright.
AS A scenario, it hardly sounds the sort of thing to get audiences from London to Broadway to Melbourne laughing in the aisles: repressed man wakes up depressed, has no friends because they've all been married off, and can't find his place in the world.Soon, however, Richard Hannay is off to the theatre, becomes embroiled in a thriller, and meets three women who "introduce him to his heart," explains Patrick Barlow, the English playwright who adapted Alfred Hitchcock's 1935 melodramatic film The 39 Steps for the stage and found himself with an enduring hit.Barlow, 61, recently in Australia on a holiday from Britain en route to visit his girlfriend in Newcastle, describes a "tender love story" in his potted synopsis while sitting in the drawing room of the Sydney bed and breakfast where he is staying.But of course what keeps the audiences coming back to The 39 Steps is the Pythonesque absurdity of his adaptation: the pratfall laughs and the split-second comic physicality of its double-crossing spy spoof sensibility. As one person wrote on YouTube last year beneath a clip from the Broadway production: "Such a great antidote to campaign rhetoric and Wall Street."Barlow is yet to see the well-toured Australian cast perform his play for the Melbourne Theatre Company - he had been to Melbourne twice, though never at the right time - but the production is doing quite nicely, thank you.Directed again by Englishwoman Maria Aitken, it returns to the Playhouse this week after a sell-out MTC season last April, with Helena Christinson (who was in last year's production) and newcomers Russell Fletcher, Mark Pegler and Jo Turner taking on the absurdity of 139 parts.At the heart of the antics is Hannay - played by Pegler - who is falsely accused of murder. Curiously, producer Edward Snape originally wanted Barlow in the role of Hannay. Snape was proffering a script that drew on Scottish author John Buchan's original all-male thriller novel The 39 Steps, published two decades before the very different Hitchcock celluloid interpretation.Snape and Barlow had bumped into one another in London's West End when the producer asked the playwright and erstwhile comic actor - whose face might be familiar to Australian audiences from roles in the Jennifer Saunders comedies Jam and Jerusalem and Absolutely Fabulous - to audition for the role.Barlow read the script and was blunt. "I thought it could be funnier," he recalls. "I said, 'Let me be Hannay and rewrite it', because this script was missing a lot of tricks."I then watched the Hitchcock film, which is fantastic. I said, 'What if we based it on the film? It would be an interesting challenge.' And God knows how, Edward got the Hitchcock estate interested in it. So we had the rights to the film and to the book, and carte blanche to write as I wanted to write it."And me playing Hannay kind of fell by the by. I became so obsessed by writing. I used to be an actor - that's all I did, and writing was a sideline - but it's now completely changed; writing is my real thing and I do a bit of acting here and there."One wonders if Barlow secretly still hankers to play Hannay. Does he see the character, despite being a Canadian, as akin to the British, given he is removed from displays of emotion? "Yes, I find it an infuriating but an endearing quality of the British, that they are - we are - disconnected from our emotions."And yet, we wish we weren't. It's not just a disconnection, there's also a kind of terrible feeling of yearning."Barlow took chunks of dialogue direct from the film, and liberally sprinkled in Hitchcockian allusions. "The director was keen for more of them to go in," says Barlow, "but I needed a bit of persuading because I thought it was a bit too cute having too many references."The Broadway producers were desperate to have more Hitchcock. And [the allusions] certainly go down an absolute storm in America."The play premiered in the West Yorkshire Playhouse in June 2005, and transferred to London just over a year later. Reviewers were initially slow to recognise the charms of this small-scale production. Dominic Cavendish wrote in The Telegraph in 2006 "the evening is big on ephemeral laughs but short of subtlety and psychological insight" while Sam Marlow wrote in The Times "if the show remains slight, the ride is rollicking fun". The press has since warmed up considerably and the play tweaked along the way.Next, Barlow is working on a radio play for Dawn French as Joan of Arc, among other writing projects. Australia, however, has thus far lacked the fortune to see Barlow's satirical National Theatre of Brent, a send-up of all that is pretentious about British theatre.Via his alter ego, theatre director Desmond Olivier Dingle, Barlow played Prince Charles on stage in the memorably titled Love upon the Throne: The Prince Charles and Diana Story. "I met Charles not so long ago," he says, "not with Camilla but with a group of royals, who were all delightful. I nearly said, 'I've played you, sir'." But that old British reserve kicked in. "I didn't quite dare to."Until Barlow decides to act again - he nearly brought the Theatre of Brent to the Melbourne Comedy Festival one year - we have Desmond Dingle's informative writings.In his 2001 book The Complete History of the World, Dingle reliably reports that Charles Darwin is "the celebrated Australian novelist who also discovered relativity, jet propulsion and New Zealand", who "became enamoured of a scantily clad native girl".Their offspring "included Ned Kelly, Baz Luhrmann, Alice Springs and Thomas Cooke the well-known travel agent, who also discovered Australian and New Zealand".Perhaps the agent could be called on to get a terribly British playwright passage to Melbourne's Playhouse some time soon.The 39 Steps is at The Arts Centre Playhouse from Thursday until February 15. love39steps.com.au
© 2009 The Age