THE West Yorkshire Playhouse press release for its new staging of The 39 Steps would have it that Simon Corble and Nobby Dimon's adaptation has been "touched up" by Patrick Barlow.

Patrick smiles at this description. "Touched up? It's a bit more than that now," he says.

For the creator of the National Theatre of Brent, the company that famously re-staged the Zulu Wars with a cast of two, making the impossible possible is his forte.

The adventures of innocent hero Richard Hannay, as realised on screen by Alfred Hitchcock, is the kind of theatrical challenge he loves.

The invitation to, er, touch up the Corble and Dimon play was issued "ages ago" by Edward Snape of the Fiery Angel production company. "He said 'we've got this script and it's not quite got there yet, would you have a look at it?'. I read it and thought 'yeah, it looks a really funny idea, let's see if I can 'comedy-fy' it up a bit'," Patrick says.

"I realised that they'd used a lot of John Buchan's book when what people really know is Hitchcock's film.

"To cut a long story short, I took the brilliant concept of four actors staging Hitchcock's version with the minimum of resources.

"Step by step I matched it up to the movie and wrote my own version, but I also knew it had to be more than a retelling of the film. While just putting the movie on stage would be fun, what was engrossing was to locate the really interesting story of Hannay, this lost and depressed loner, who's 37 and thinks 'what's the point any more?'."

That storyline will pulse through a production full of theatricality, in which legendary Hitchcock scenes such as the chase on the Flying Scotsman, the Escape on the Forth Bridge and the death-defying finale in the London Palladium will be recreated.

"The lure of the theatrically impossible has always appealed to me. That was there with the National Theatre of Brent and it's here too," he says.

"But I don't want it to be a spoof; I want it to be something where the audience gets caught up in the adventure and lunacy of it all. There's the drama of Hannay being pursued for murder and then there's the drama of whether the actors can pull it off, so it's like a play within a play."

Charles Hutchinson

The 39 Steps, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, until July 16. Box office: 0113 213 7700.

Updated: 15:48 Thursday, June 16, 2005