Charles Edwards
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About the author:
Charles Edwards recently appeared as Sandy Tyrell in Hay Fever opposite Judi Dench at the Theatre Royal Haymarket. His other theatre credits include Much Ado About Nothing, Private Lives, Twelfth Night, John Bull’s Other Island, The Duchess of Malfi, Mourning Becomes Electra, All My Sons, Making Noise Quietly, Our Betters, The Merchant of Venice and The Heidi Chronicles. He has appeared in the films The All Together, Batman Begins, Mansfield Park, Relative Values and An Ideal Husband. Now starring in The 39 Steps, Edwards is having a jolly time sending up Hitchcock’s famous thriller. Here, he explains why his current role is just the ticket.
I spent most of this summer at the Haymarket flirting with Judi Dench. We were Judith Bliss and Sandy Tyrell in Hay Fever, and just as I was thinking that things couldn’t get any better, Catherine McCormack told me about a play that she had been asked to do at the Tricycle Theatre. It was an adaptation by Patrick Barlow of a film by Alfred Hitchcock of a book by John Buchan—The 39 Steps—to be performed by only four actors playing a frenzied myriad of parts. I was immediately jealous. It sounded exactly like the kind of thing I’d love, but assuming that my current engagement would exclude me from any involvement I tried to forget about it. But further to a visit by the director Maria Aitken to the Haymarket, I was offered the role of Richard Hannay, and that the dates would work if I was prepared to rehearse with her by day and chat up Judi Dench in the evening.
Charles Edwards & Catherine McCormack
in The 39 Steps
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I watched the Hitchcock movie in preparation and was captivated. The mood, the music, the dark wit, the accents, the fog, the crackly soundtrack. We love those old movies, we love the way they talk and the way they fall in love and the way they hold their guns (always at the hip, hastily whipped from a pocket), because it’s all of an age that probably never was—we find a curious kind of comfort in cinematic nostalgia, particularly in black and white. What’s so great about being part of this show is that—yes, it is certainly a pastiche—but it’s done with such genuine affection and total admiration for its source that the result is something startlingly different and quite unique. It is quite possibly, to quote last week’s
Observer, “exactly what the West End needs.”
You’d be a fool to try to rival or undermine the wit of Hitchcock, and that’s what’s so clever and inventive about Patrick’s adaptation—it respects utterly the original 1935 film script but has an enormous amount of fun with it, too. It manages to be extremely funny while at the same time preserving the tautness of the narrative. It’s a show I would love to go and see. And it’s one of the rare times when you can say that a show has something for everyone and mean it. The audacity of attempting to recreate the film on stage won me over instantly. I mean, there’s a train in it, for a start. A high-speed train. There’s a waterfall. A car. Most of the Scottish Highlands. The Forth Bridge. A pursuit across the moors by biplane, Hitchcock’s precursor to his own North by Northwest. Patrick even enhances these apparently unstageable sequences by adding a chase along the roof of the moving train, and people falling off the Forth Bridge into the freezing depths below, and by having the biplane crashing before our very eyes!
Charles Edwards in The 39 Steps
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The appeal of the character of Richard Hannay, as embellished by Patrick, was huge. He’s the classic Hitchcock innocent who knows too much, tumbling headlong into a succession of nail-biting scrapes but all the while retaining his poise, his English sang-froid, and most essentially his coiffure. Leaving a trail of broken-hearted beautiful women in his wake. And naturally, saving the country.
The season at the Tricycle last month was a sell-out, so now we’re at the Criterion. The audiences continue to cry with laughter and break into spontaneous applause and stand up at the end. And it has to be said that professionally speaking, it’s hard to beat the feeling of spending a couple of hours each night with Catherine, Rupert Degas and Simon Gregor, who between them feverishly and hilariously play all the other characters, having terrific fun, whilst witnessing the applause and cheers of delight from an audience who are clearly feeling what I felt when I read the script for the first time—that this is something quite new. As the play opens, we discover Hannay wondering how to get himself out of his torpor; he says he needs “something mindless and trivial, something utterly pointless—I know! A West End show! That’ll do the trick!” The tone is set—and a breakneck hour and a half of unbridled laughter on a wet autumn evening in these dark days is, as Hannay would undoubtedly concur, just the ticket.