On stage and on screen, Part I

Above is a key sequence from Alfred Hitchcock's 1935 classic, The 39 Steps. See post below for a discussion of stage versus screen techniques vis-à-vis the Huntington's current production.

(My review is here.)

On stage and on screen, Part II

There's an interesting moment in the ART's Don Juan Giovanni (image below) in which Moliere's Don Juan and Sganerelle check out a drive-in movie - only to find their counterparts in Mozart acting out the opening scenes of Don Giovanni, the opera, onscreen. It's a neat conceptual trick, made all the niftier by the fact that the Don Giovanni cast is also onstage - being filmed live for the feed to the screen. But therefore, of course, the Moliere characters wind up on screen as well; for a moment stage and screen seem to merge, and with a postmodern poof! Mozart's Don Giovanni, Leporello, Donna Anna, et. al., are all "onstage" at once, interacting within the same medium.



Okay, this idea is not entirely new - at least not to those who've seen The Purple Rose of Cairo, much less Sherlock, Jr. - and its ramifications, alas, are soon dropped from the tedious antics of Don Juan Giovanni. But for a moment the production cleverly addresses the issues I thought might be explored in the Huntington's production of The 39 Steps, which claims to evoke Hitchcock's classic film on its stage.

A collision between stage and screen at this level should fascinate - only the Huntington stage production never scratches the surface of Hitchcock's method, which is to move the focus of our subjective "identification" at will (he once described this technique as giving the audience the sense of a chase from the perspective of the fox and the hounds at the same time).

The long clip above has several brilliant sequences, but perhaps most apropos to this discussion would be the "scene" about two minutes in, where Robert Donat overhears his companions reading about his case in the paper - and then attempts to judge from their expressions whether or not they've recognized him. One seems to smile at him with secret knowledge - or does he? The sequence culminates with a tracking shot (which Hitchcock would spend his career extending and perfecting) that follows Donat as he marches out to an officer on the platform to see if he'll be identified. This is the kind of sequence which, one is tempted to assume, would be impossible to replicate on stage in its step-by-step development (indeed, I think the Huntington skipped it) - but something of its essence might be conjured using screens and the sleight-of-hand displayed by Don Juan Giovanni.

The cinema has long been held to be the realm of surrealism and dream-life, while the stage has historically been viewed as a platform for communal self-awareness. Is there a middle ground between the two? Shakespeare, of course, deployed a "cinematic" mix of asides and soliloquies - his "camera" swings from panorama to detail to internal mental state without warning, and with utter aplomb. But he never "moves" through an environment - particularly not a fantastic one - subjectively, as film can. Is such an effect possible on stage? That's the question I wish had been answered, or at least addressed, by The 39 Steps.

Stage fright

Too bad Hitch gets it in the back, too.

Nothing seemed more of a sure thing this season than The 39 Steps, the West End transfer that was stopping by the Huntington on its way to Broadway later this year (I mean to ponder that arrangement further in a later post). As I'm a fan of the Hitchcock film (watch the whole movie in streaming video here), and have a special interest in the intersection of screen and stage technique, you can imagine my disappointment as I slowly discovered, once the show's faux curtain rose, that I wasn't going to be treated to a clever, tongue-in-cheek homage to the dated, but delicious, thrills of the original, but would instead be subjected to "Mel Brooks's Young Hitchcock!," a relentless barrage of dumbed-down story-theatre gags that thoroughly patronized its source, the early masterpiece in which the Master found his method: the wrong man accused, the cross-country chase, the icy blonde, and of course the mysterious, but meaningless, "MacGuffin."

Now before you say it, I hardly expected the production to approach the screen version on bended knee, and many of the jokes, it's true, land just where they should, in a pageant of seat-of-the-pants stagecraft: director Maria Aitken deftly finds simple, but effective means of literally tracking Hitchcock's camera over a moving train and down a bridge, and then over the barren moors to Scotland and back again. A particularly inspired sprint of shadowplay - that features not just Hitch's traditional appearance, but a cameo by the Loch Ness Monster - may be worth the price of admission alone. A similar interlude interpolated from North by Northwest (the American offspring of Steps) is likewise a wicked hoot. In general, the show's at its best in shadow (at left); whenever Hitch's hero, Richard Hannay, is tracked by flickering spot- or flash-light, the stage version suddenly evokes the panic of the chase with more spirit than the movie ever did.

But mysteriously, the production seems determined to telegraph the inadequacy of these tricks - even though they often grip us. We're invited to guffaw over and over at the actors' quick changes (but shouldn't those thrill us, too?) - and then double over at their broader-than-the-moors Scottish schtick (much of which would have embarrassed the old Carol Burnett Show).

The end result, of course, is the utter destruction of the film's romance (Madeleine Carroll and Robert Donat handcuffed together, at left) - and it's startling to realize, in retrospect, how central romance was to Hitchcock's classics (ponder, for a moment, Notorious, Rear Window and Vertigo instead of Psycho). Not for nothing does Hitch's hero - who's soon literally chained to his heroine - encounter one unhappily-hitched couple after another (he'd like to escape that fate, too). And let's not forget the picture's political romance - the romance of the individual, if you will, who, thrown into extraordinary circumstances, triumphs through brains, pluck, and a breezily unruffled attitude. Indeed, it's these attributes that made The 39 Steps a classic; Hitch's suspense techniques may nowadays be undermined by the limits of film in 1935, but somehow, over the course of the prolonged chase, a memorable largeness of purpose sneaks in between the mad dashes and double crosses.

But at the Huntington, we're stuck with the diminishing returns of what amounts to artistic tunnel vision. Sure, the hijinx are funny at first - and I was happy to giggle at the all-too-knowing nods to other Hitchcock flicks (while the "soundtrack," as it were, abandons the original entirely for the richer, more menacing harmonies of Bernard Herrmann). But by the umpteenth pratfall, I found myself longing for a bit of debonair derring-do, and by the finale, I was simply staring at my watch. What's most frustrating about the show, in fact, is the persistent sense of how marvelous it could really be: the cast, led by the witty, almost-too-chiseled Charles Edwards, knows exactly what it's doing, and has the confident panache of a team that's long been on the boards; Jennifer Ferrin has enough sex appeal to make us forget all about Madeleine Carroll, and Arnie Burton and Cliff Saunders barely break a sweat impersonating over 100 other characters. If only they somehow had captured the character of the original.