‘The 39 Steps’: The Umbilical Brothers On Their Hitchcockian Comedy Extravaganza
Image: Image from the rehearsals for 'The 39 Steps'. Source: The 39 Steps on Facebook
Four actors, 130 characters between them (plus a few audience members) and a hundred minutes is what’s promised with The 39 Steps, a stage rendition of the early Hitchcock movie featuring some of Australia’s most pre-eminent comedy performers.
Featured as part of the cast alongside Lisa McCune and Ian Stenlake are Aussie comedy icons Shane Dundas and David Collins, otherwise known as The Umbilical Brothers. Though they might be known for their unique style of microphonic mime, they tell City Hub that it’s been a rather rewarding process getting involved in a show as wild as this.
“We’re playing so many characters in this thing!” says Shane after a long day of rehearsals. “We’re having to change accents constantly, and that’s a big challenge because you’re doing someone else’s dialogue and flipping into these different characters. It’s a three-week rehearsal period, so we’re working like one of the steam trains these scenes are set on.”
Joining The 39 Steps was not a difficult decision for the Umbilical Brothers, as David explains: “We actually joined the show without reading the script, because we asked somebody who’d seen it and they said we’d fit. We investigated Lisa and Ian and worked out that they know what they’re doing and aren’t maniacs. And then Damian Ryan, the director… the word genius gets thrown around way too often, so we’ll use it.”
From what the duo reports, the creative process for this incarnation of The 39 Steps has been one full of creativity and freedom. “We’re not relying at all on previous iterations of this stage show, we haven’t watched them,” Shane says. “It’s just based on the text, and it’s a really compressed, great creative process we’re going through right now.”
The 39 Steps a rewarding challenge for the Umbies
That’s all while the performers have to strike a balance between Hitchcockian suspense, Monty Python antics and mystery. But that delicate balance is exactly what makes the show tick, according to Shane and David. “It’s actually easier to make a dramatic thing funny than it is to make something that’s already funny dramatic,” says David. “It’s a lot of fun!”
“It’s one of the key challenges and hopefully strengths of the show, because it still has to be a romance and a thriller,” Shane adds. “So it needs to be just serious enough when it has to be, but it can still allow extreme silliness to come into play. We’ve added some very silly elements to the show that are quite in our style, but we’ve got to make them fit within the propulsion of the story and keep it going.”
However, the Umbies haven’t had to fight to implement their own flavour into the show. Instead, they’ve been welcomed in by the rest of The 39 Steps’ creative team. “We’re all blending and bleeding into each other,” says David. “We’ve got Lisa McCune doing double takes, we’ve got Ian Stenlake acting like a living cartoon character… one of the funniest things in the show is just how he reacts to everything!”
In recommending the show, David and Shane make two very different kinds of promises. “There’s no other play in Australia that’s gonna give you an automobile chase, a train chase and a plane chase in the same two hours,” David says, before adding: “And no other play in Australia is going to have as many characters murdered by the end of the show, and some of them will be audience members.”
Meanwhile, Shane’s recommendation: “Look, Lisa McCune, Ian Stenlake and the Umbilical Brothers… surely you’re curious to see what the hell that turns out to be!”
The 39 Steps plays at the Opera House from August 8 to 30, before embarking on a national tour. More information here.
