Although originally a novel by John Buchan, The 39 Steps was substantially rewritten by Hitchcock in his iconic 1935 film version, and it is Hitchcock’s version that has been adapted for the West End stage by Maria Aitken and Patrick Barlow. The play stars Richard Hannay, a dashing, upper class layabout. After a visit to the music hall ends in an unexpected shoot out, Hannay is entertaining  a young German woman in his London flat when she starts to tell him of a German spy ring, whose leader is based in Scotland. The woman is then promptly murdered, while still in Hannay’s flat, and Hannay is forced to flee, suspected of her murder. He journeys to Scotland, escaping the police only by leaping from the train onto the Forth Rail Bridge, and when he eventually reaches his goal, he finds that not everything is as it seems… Hannay does of course win through in the end, after many more thrillingly implausible escapades, dashing over the Scottish moors, dodging hails of bullets from passing planes, leaping over bogs and hiding behind waterfalls while handcuffed to a young woman, in true James Bond style.

Such breath-taking action scenes are all well and good in a film – but how on earth can they be translated into theatre? The answer in this case seems to be, by using every trick in the book and more. The staging really is incredibly clever – the aeroplanes are portrayed through a stunning shadow play, the Forth Rail Bridge by a contraption of ropes and ladders dangling over the stage, while the effective use of mime combined with ingenious lighting and sound, plus possibly illegal quantities of dry ice, were used to evoke station platforms, railway carriages, and car rides across misty moors. However, there is far more to the success of The 39 Steps than just clever staging. Rather than trying to recreate the dramatic thrills of the film step by step, the play instead jokes around with the idea of the upper-class English action hero, an outdated character type that has been satirised and parodied so many times that it has become a stereotype. So the play doesn’t even try to take itself seriously, but embraces its own artifice to comic effect with great enthusiasm – indeed, the fourth wall is not so much broken, as shattered into fragments and showered across the audience like confetti. As well as witty quips and one-liners, the play is positively stuffed full of visual gags which defy description, but were executed with great verve and precision, to positive gales of hilarity from the audience.

The acting was, unsurprisingly, highly polished, and yet also largely managed to retain a feeling of spontaneity. Richard Ede was perfect for the role of Hannay, although Rob Witcomb and Andrew Hodges almost stole the show as they switched with lightning speed between a huge range of different roles, often changing character while still onstage. Olivia Greene, who played the three female roles, was marginally less accomplished, but to be fair she mainly had to play a straight role in reaction to the other three actors, which offered less scope to showcase her talents. My only real complaint when it came to the acting was the accents – there were some decidedly dodgy German and Scottish accents floating around…

On the whole this was an extremely enjoyable production, which would appeal equally to all ages. Aitken and Barlow have not just translated an already popular story into theatre and relied on the success of the film to sell tickets – they have created a new play that, thanks to its rollicking visual humour, ingenious staging and charming self-awareness, could never be performed in quite the same way in another medium. Aitken and Barlow’s The 39 Steps is truly a brilliant use of theatre.