Evaluation of a live performance:

The performance I went to see was "The 39 Steps" on the 25th of March, at the Criterion Theatre in London, it's produced by Gaumont British.

The original 39 steps was an action spy novel written by John Buchan in 1915. Then Alfred Hitchcock produced a film, then the play was written and when I first saw the play it was a bit of a shock seeing as the book and film are set as thrillers and the play is very much a comedy.
The play is set in 1914 and Europe is on the brink of war. The main protagonist Richard Hannay is bored with life, until he runs into a mysterious German woman names Annabella Schmidt at the theatre. Richard then takes the woman home with him and she reveals that she is tracking down …show more content…
At first the pace was fairly slow but then as soon as the Annabella Schmidt died the pace and comedy sped up dramatically and of anything got gradually faster until Richard gets to a Scottish farm house for which it slows down for a bit to only come back twice as fast paced.
The symbols used in The 39 steps where very powerful and easy to spot. stereotypical costume and props where used to symbolise the character the actor was playing, for example a farmer had a straw hat and a work coat and a paper boy had a simple flat cap. These help the audience to make mental links between props and the individual characters. The use of the casts bodies was done very well by the actor just wearing a big black macintosh with the hood up to be things like styles, bushes, trees and rivers to get in the way of Richard and pamela when they were escaping from the spies but they also managed to make it comical at the same time by grabbing hold of Pamela and holding her up.

The spoken language used in the production was very varied in different scenes, the development of some of the spoken language was very good and difficult to do because the