Turns out I never noted this one - rather remiss of me. It was excellent, anyway, revelling in the theatricality of theatre and highlighting its own artifice at every turn, but in such a way as to add to the joy that a good performance brings - energetic and inventive, but sincere (or perhaps 'grounded') enough that it doesn't descend into pure farce. To put it another way, the core of what one wants from a play - story, characters, sets - aren't obscured despite the production's foregrounding of the artificial apparatus/mechanisms by which those 'core' elements are always (overtly or otherwise) enabled and brought into being. To put it another another way, "The 39 Steps" was hella fun! The archetypally Brit figure at its centre, hinting at but not falling into caricature, makes a great straight man and protagonist for the thriller/caper events of the plot and it rockets ahead at a mile a minute, running through an impressive number of locations and characters as it goes.
[part of an MTC subscription with Steph, Sunny & co]
[part of an MTC subscription with Steph, Sunny & co]
