Charles in Charge
By Robert Simonson
Playbill Magazine
June Issue
With his English tweeds, pipe in hand and an eyebrow knowingly arched, Charles Edwards is charming and silly as the hunted hero of The 39 Steps.
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Dashing figures are not often seen on Broadway these days. It’s a character type and style of acting that’s simply not called for in 21st-century theatre, where male protagonists tend toward mumbling, damaged antiheroes if you’re lucky and proudly immoral sociopaths if you’re not. Moreover, there are practical reasons for the disappearance of gallant gentlemen. What would they do? Today’s plays furnish no women in need of rescue, no wicked villains ripe to be foiled.
That is, except in the British transport The 39 Steps, in which Charles Edwards gives the most dashing performance in New York – even if it is intentionally self-mocking. In Patrick Barlow’s spoofing adaptation of Alfred Hitchcock’s taut 1935 thriller, Edwards plays Richard Hannay, the part created by Robert Donat on screen. Through a chance encounter with a mysterious woman in a theatre, the jaded, debonair Hannay is drawn into an international spy ring out to kill him and his unwilling partner in flight, the disbelieving Pamela (played by Madeleine Carroll in the film, Jennifer Ferrin onstage). To elude his would-be captors and expose an insidious plot against The Free World, Hannay must ride outside moving trains, plummet from a bridge, don various disguises, woo several women and take a bullet – all while preserving an air of sangfroid and a carefully groomed pencil moustache.
Edwards – who has played the part hundreds of times, first at the Tricycle Theatre in London, then on the West End, then at the Roundabout Theatre Company’s American Airlines Theatre, and now finally at Broadway’s Cort Theatre – has the pose down to a science. “My five-second solution to becoming dashing, in this context, is to cock my eyebrow,” he explained. “That says, ‘I’m dashing. I’m heroic.’ And also it lets the audience in on the joke.
“I’ve tried to comment on the dashingness and heroic qualities of Hannay,” he continued. “It’s fun to play that up. I think it’s probably rather boring to play these roles seriously. But in a comedy, it’s great fun, because you’re spoofing it, you’re heightening its absurdity. I like to tip a wink at the audience.”
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