Beloved star of Australian stage and screen Lisa McCune brings her ineffable charm and grace to multiple roles in the upcoming production of comedy classic ‘The 39 Steps’, touring Australia August-October.
Lisa stars in ‘The 39 Steps’ alongside fellow veteran Australian actor Ian Stenlake, as well as The Umbilical Brothers, Shane Dundas and David Collins. Together, this tiny, tight-knit cast portray 130 characters over 100 chaotic minutes of non-stop action and hilarity.
“It’s a very dense play with a lot of physical comedy as well as quite a wordy piece where there’s only four actors on stage, so you’re pretty much on the whole time, and it moves,” Lisa says.
“It’s a chase story based on the original play which was then made into the Hitchcock film. Once it starts, it’s like the train that’s in the show – it does not stop. It is on the move, meeting new characters, new situations and having to role play.”
A mainstay of modern theatre, ‘The 39 Steps’ was originally an adventure novel written by John Buchan and published in 1915. Since then, it has been adapted for film, TV, theatre and even radio. Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 film is considered a classic masterpiece embodying the prototypical ‘man on the run’ trope that Hitchcock would explore in later films such as ‘North By Northwest’.
“The protagonist, Richard Hannay, is looking for a bit of adventure and boy does he get it when he meets a woman in a theatre and his life is changed forever,” Lisa explains.
“There’s a love story through it that is just glorious and there’s a lot going on. Ultimately, it’s a show that will make you laugh, and I think having an experience in a theatre that is light is a really nice one at the moment.”
Image © Benny Capp
The current stage version of ‘The 39 Steps’ is a re-adaptation of the story by Patrick Barlow based on the original four-actor concept written by Simon Corble and Nobby Dimon, condensing the fast-paced action of a sprawling spy thriller into a small-scale production leveraging minimal cast for maximum laughs.
For Lisa, it’s an opportunity to exercise some creative freedom as well as a rare reprieve from the more dramatic roles she is known for, though no less demanding.
“I play three characters,” Lisa says.
“I play a German spy, a Scottish farm wife who is very innocent and naïve and desperate to get out, and then the main character who is English and becomes the love interest of the protagonist.
“The first job that I got out of drama school when I was 20 was having to do a Scottish accent in a Coles commercial, can you believe it? It was quite a bizarre ad,” she laughs.
“Because it’s a comedy, there’s something so funny if it spills into some kind of weird accent somewhere, because she is a spy and travels through Europe. The world of possibilities within this organism, it doesn’t have boundaries, which I love.”
Like the show itself, ‘The 39 Steps’ Australia tour is short, sharp and full of laughs, making whistlestops at the Sydney Opera House, Civic Theatre in Newcastle, Comedy Theatre in Melbourne and QPAC in Brisbane. In 2025, ‘The 39 Steps’ remains as poignant and relevant as when it was first published more than 100 years ago.
“We’ve certainly still got spies, that paranoia that still exists today,” Lisa notes.
“This was the beginning, as Hitchcock talked about, of the chase stories where people are on the run. It’s got a charge about it because the characters are on the run and they’re being chased. It makes it such an interesting journey with lots of laughs along the way.”
‘The 39 Steps’ Australia 2025 Tour Dates
8-30 August – Sydney Opera House2-6 September – Civic Theatre (Newcastle)
10-28 September – Comedy Theatre (Melbourne)
7-19 October – QPAC (Brisbane)
