Daily Express, 12 April 1994, by Maureen Paton
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When director Keith Baxter revived Patrick Hamilton's 1929 
play about two thrill-killers last year he could hardly 
have been expected to see into the future.

The subsequent death of the unfortunate Stephen Milligan, 
however, inevitably means that Baxter's emphasis upon the 
erotic side of slow strangulation now appears to be in the 
worst possible taste.

Baxter has boldly and fashionably brought out the 
homosexual sub-text in the story of two nihilistic Oxford 
undergraduates whose intellectual arrogance persuades them 
to commit the perfect murder of one of their fellow 
students.

The evening begins with the creepy sight of three male 
bodies--two living and one dead--entwined in a naked 
tableau that leaves no doubt about the physical 
relationship between Wyndham Brandon, Charles Granillo, and 
their victim Ronald Kentley, who they have garrotted.

Though designer Simon Higlett has stressed the Gothic 
horrors with the strange angles of his Mayfair setting, the 
rest of this ponderous and creaky production never remotely 
matches that opening scene for impact. Tristan Gemmill and 
James Buller as Brandon and Granillo are sleek, charmless, 
amoral animals about whose fate it is impossible to care.

Even the show's star Anthony Head is glamorous torpor 
personified as a limping aesthete who turns sleuth in the 
languid tradition of aristocratic amateur detectives and 
dallies awhile in moral debate before blowing the whistle 
on them.

Since characterisation is minimal for this morbid 
theatrical exercise in the macabre, I felt equally torpid 
about the whole thing.



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