promotional photo

Claire Brownell and Ted Deasy in Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps at the Shubert

Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps

First national tour of the Broadway comedy. Nov. 5-7, Shubert Theater, 247 College St. $15-$56. 203-562-5666, shubert.com.

When John Buchan published his memoir Pilgrim's Way in 1940, here's what he said about his writing one of the most influential mystery novels of the 20th century:

"While pinned to my bed during the first months of war and compelled to keep my mind off too tragic realities, I gave myself to stories of adventure. I invented a young South African called Richard Hannay, who had traits copied from many friends, and I amused myself with considering what he would do in various emergencies. In The Thirty-Nine Steps, he was spy-hunting in Britain; in Greenmantle, he was on a mission to the East; and in Mr. Standfast, published in 1919, he was busy in Scotland and France. The first had an immediate success, and since that kind of thing seemed to amuse my friends in the trenches, I was encouraged to continue."

And that's pretty much it.

Buchan wrote nearly two dozen novels, more than a dozen historical books and biographies, and voluminous journals and diaries, but he spends more chapters of Pilgrim's Way discussing his love of fishing than he does on his immensely influential and world-renowned espionage novel, which has not been out of print since it was first published over 90 years ago.

The unassuming author, then, probably wouldn't have much minded the satirical savagery heaped upon his adventure-between-World-Wars spy thriller by the playwright Patrick Barlow and the frenzied four-person cast which assume all the dozens of roles — spies, shepherds, murderers, a music hall trickster named "Mr. Memory," policemen, railwaymen and a damsel in distress, among others. (Only the actor playing Hannay is confined to a single role.) The comic adaptation was an immediate hit when first attempted (with an even smaller cast) at England's West Yorkshire Playhouse in 2005, which enabled it to cross the ocean to a regional theater shakedown in Boston, then over to Broadway (where it has shifted venues twice) and now embarks on a cross-country tour which begins this week at the Shubert in New Haven. That may not match the abrupt intercontinental train journey involuntarily undertaken by a hapless Hannay in the show's rapidly plotted pursuit, but it's an impressive trek all the same.

What's especially noteworthy is that The 39 Steps (which, unlike the book, uses numerals in the title) is the sort of show that barely a decade ago would more likely have been relegated to the fringe festival or summer regional theater circuits, or just hung around Off Broadway. Now, this and other shows that once would've been presumed too small, edgy or cultish for the mainstream — Avenue Q, Tap Dogs, The Wedding Singer, etc. — make up the bulk of the once-staid Shubert's current season.

The Shubert has hosted non-musical suspense thrillers before, of course, but seldom since its 1920s-'50s heyday as a pre-Broadway tryout and post-Broadway tour stop, when it hosted some of the previous heavyweights of the genre, from Seven Keys to Baldpate to The Cat and the Canary and A Shot in the Dark. In the more recent past, there was a fondly remembered campy tour of Dial M for Murder that played the Shubert in 1995, with the amazing has-been cast of Nancy Allen, Roddy MacDowell and Dynasty's John James.

Like The Thirty-Nine Steps, when Dial M for Murder was turned into a film, it was directed by the great Alfred Hitchcock in 1935. It is really Hitchcock's 39 Steps, and not Buchan's book, that Barlow's play is most closely satirizing. (In England, where the book is still widely known and read and has been filmed several times, the stage show was titled John Buchan's The 39 Steps; in the U.S., it's touted as Alfred Hitchcock's ...)

Buchan's contribution to the comedy is not that he created such easily mocked source material (in the way that the lackluster movie Zero Hour! served as the template for Airplane!), but that he wrote a timely and original work that established many of the ideas that others later turned into clichés. Buchan's freewheeling yarn is a delicious blend of modern superstition, urban paranoia and post-industrial derring-do. Hitchcock spread that mixture even further through the nascent medium of talking motion pictures, pepping up the pace and creating (in the handsome form of pencil-thin-mustached Ronald Colman) a new cinematic exemplar of the storied wisecracking British adventurer. Hitchcock was to famously return to the pell-mell decent-guy-under-surveillance storyline with North by Northwest.

Will The 39 Steps continue to convulse audiences with its quick-change antics, now that it's plunged itself into the changing tides of national touring, where the sizes and shapes of the venues are far from uniform, and where small casts can get swallowed up by too-large auditoriums? That's something even Mr. Memory can't foresee, though the show's virtually assured a smooth start at the comfy and comparatively intimate Shubert.

As a novelist, John Buchan was content to scribble stuff that amused his friends. If handled properly, the play based on his landmark spy thriller will continue that amiable adventure tradition.