Geoffrey Simon Brown in The 39 Steps, Teatro Live!. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It seems exactly right, inspired really, that Farren Timoteo should launch his Teatro Live! artistic directorship of the comedy theatre company with a show that turns a 1935 Hitchcock spy thriller into a manically high-speed, hilariously low-budget adventure for four actors. Correction: four actors, plus four trunks, four chairs, a ladder, a movable door, and a whole bunch of hats.

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In an age of inflated big-money stage extravaganzas, you’ve got to love any theatrical enterprise that starts with the actors assembling stuff on a bare stage.

The 39 Steps, Patrick Barlow’s stage riff on the movie thriller adapted from John Buchan’s intricately plotted 1915 spy novel, is a test of ingenuity and comic timing that’s a tribute to theatre and its less-is-more brigade of practitioners. And it’s also a chance to use the words zany and clever in one sentence; I’m grabbing it while I can.

It begins with our ridiculously suave hero Richard Hannay, recently returned from Canada, languishing in ennui, pipe in hand, in his London flat. In the production directed by Timoteo (himself a Teatro leading man of note), the dashing Hannay is played in high tweedy style by Geoffrey Simon Brown, with a ’30s Leslie Howard accent that’s as clipped as his moustache.

He’s bored with the world, the news of endless “wars and rumours of war,” and himself. He requires “something mindless and trivial. Something utterly pointless,” he says. “I know! A trip to the theatre!”

And so it begins, with a theatre joke and a slinky femme fatale (Priya Narine in the first of her three femmes fatales in the show) with an unidentifiable mittel-Euro accent, a gun, and a knife in her back. And suddenly Richard Hannay, accused murderer, has been seduced out of his armchair into a sinister international intrigue that involves the fate of the whole country.

Katie Yoner and Michael Watt in The 39 Steps, Teatro Live!. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

What ensues in this Hitchcock spoof cum homage is a top-velocity chase, by train, by car, by crop-duster (a little wink at North By Northwest), on foot, through the fog and mist of the Scottish highlands into sinister hotels, remote inns, creepy farmhouses, cop shops…. It is for the Clown 1/ Clown 2 duo of  Michael Watt and Katie Yoner, the one statuesque and the other petite, to populate the stage with 130-plus characters. Newcomers both to Teatro, they start with a funny music hall duo at the Palladium, and expand their escalating repertoire to include hapless coppers, vaudevillian detectives, rustics, hoteliers, aassassins, innkeepers, a milk man, a professor, an engineer, sheep …), a lot of moustaches, and a dizzying assortment of accents — sometimes multiples in a single scene.

Yoner (of Rat Academy fame) is an experienced bouffon with a tiny (sometimes inaudible) voice. Watt, whose purchase on a whole lexicon of accents and volumes is unerring, is a find as a physical comedian. They both commit, valiantly, to the most outlandish theatrical demands, as they scramble to keep up with the plot.

Michael Watt, Katie Yoner, and Geoffrey Simon Brown in The 39 Steps, Teatro Live!. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

And since their theatrical duties include rearranging the trunks, the chairs, the ladder and the door, and the odd lamp (designer: Chantel Fortin) to establish locales, assisted materially by Rory Turner’s noir-esque lighting — their inventiveness and comic busy-ness are extreme. The crop-dusting image is executed ingeniously with a ladder and lights. Lighting and Brown’s agility conjure a chase scene in and on top of a hurtling train. A walk-through in a sinister Scottish mansion is amusing theatrical legerdemain.

Minimalism is a strenuous workout with a big comic payoff, it turns out. As the plot gathers more and more characters and voices, the quick changes get more frenzied, and sillier. Weapons, along with Brian Bast’s wigs, hats, costume pieces, fly through the air. This larky Timoteo production is based on the rarefied art of the timed near-miss (and the mysterious wandering impulses of fake moustaches).

Priya Narine and Geoffrey Simon Brown in The 39 Steps, Teatro Live!. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Brown’s dashing Hannay, the straight man of the enterprise, perpetually on the move, gets nearly trapped over and over, and escapes by the skin of his teeth, without breaking a sweat. Must be those years in Canada, old chap. But will Narine’s Hitchcock blonde, or her the rural maiden, be his undoing? Is this a classic case of cherchez la femme fatale?

The actors and Timoteo and co embrace high-style silliness, so that you can just sit back, take your mind off worry mode, and let clever theatricality work its magic. The first show of the Timoteo tenure is a ripping night out.

REVIEW

The 39 Steps

Theatre: Teatro Live!

Written by: Patrick Barlow, adapted from Hitchcock’s movie The 39 Steps

Directed by: Farren Timoteo

Starring: Geoffrey Simon Brown, Priya Narine, Michael Watt, Katie Yoner

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through Nov. 30

Tickets: teatrolive.com