PATRICK Barlow has "touched up" The 39 Steps, and thankfully there is no law against it.

He not only touches up Simon Corble and Nobby Dimon's original concept of a stage adaptation of John Buchan's novel but tickles its tummy and has it eating out of his (sleight) of hand.

Touching up isn't the half of it. The originator of the National Theatre of Brent's modus operandi - making a drama out of a staff-shortage crisis - has defied the laws of mathematics once more.

His vision is to turn Hitchcock's 1935 thriller from cinematic to theatrical, downsizing set-pieces somehow without a hitch, with only four actors playing 1,311 characters in 89 mad minutes.

Robert Whitelock's Richard Hannay is propelled on stage on a chair from one side; a table with a glass of whisky joins him from the other side, its pulley-drawn passage to the meeting point equally erratic, as if the stage crew has been at the bottle already. This sets the pattern for the cast battling with its bargain-basement props yet stoically battling on in that clipped, brisk manner of Thirties' British films.

Hannay, as serious as his pencil-slim moustache, is a loner, lost and depressed at 37 and in a heap of trouble when the police pursue him to Scotland, suspecting him of the murder of the mysterious Annabella Schmidt (Lisa Jackson). That seriousness never deserts Whitelock's face as Hannay is caught up in the maelstrom of theatrical lunacy and Buchaneering adventure.

The drama within the drama is to see if Whitelock, Jackson and the multi-role playing Mark Hadfield and Simon Gregor can pull off the comic zest of a Hitchcock homage on a shoestring budget while retaining the tension of a thriller.

Indeed they do, in high-speed re-enactments of Hitchcock scenes on the Flying Scotsman, Forth Bridge and London Palladium that could career off the track at any time but never do.

All the while, Hadfield and the outstanding Gregor dash dazzlingly from character to character to rounds of applause, equally deserved by designer Peter McKintosh and Fiona Buffini, whose spiffing production catches the skin-of-the-teeth comic style of Barlow perfectly.

Updated: 10:44 Friday, June 24, 2005