Daily Mail, 12 April 1994, by Jack Tinker
"Timely full-frontal twist as this vintage melodrama swings 
back"
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*Rope* by Patrick Hamilton: Wyndhams 

WITH evidence of the evils of snuff movies, of killings for 
kicks and a welter of mindless violence screaming out at us 
from every side, now seems as ripe a time as any to bring 
back *Rope*. 

I speak, of course, of the vintage play, not the ultimate 
penalty. 

When Patrick Hamilton wrote this chiller, back in 1929, 
reality overtook art. Before the play was even produced the 
world was being hypnotised by the celebrated Leopold and 
Loeb case in America (two rich, highly intelligent 
undergraduates who slew simply as an intellectual experiment 
to satisfy their vanity). 

The similarities were stark. But to be frank, the play 
itself can be as creaky and remorseless, and about as much 
fun, as the gallows themselves. The temptation on occasions 
is to dismiss it as old rope. 

But Keith Baxter's vivid new production gives it an 
altogether new sensation. Not least because he begins with 
an inventive nude tableau. The three intertwined figures, 
frozen like marble caught in the moonlight, are draped over 
an enormous coffin-like chest. Finally two of them move - 
and one rolls over dead. 

In this one gesture Baxter has caught the sensual 
undercurrent which throbs beneath Hamilton's by now 
elaborately mechanical plotting. 

By heightening the whole theatricality of the piece, staging 
it on an evocative Expressionist setting, he enables us to 
sit back and enjoy the painstaking construction of the piece 
as an horologist might savour the inner workings of a rare 
antique clock. 

The play was never a pleasant one. But then it is examining 
one of the most unpleasant of human aberrations. 

Baxter faces these issues as full frontally, yet as 
tastefully, as in his inspired prologue. The homosexuality 
of the two cold-blooded killers is in no way disguised from 
us, though it most certainly is carefully withheld from the 
guests whom they invite so callously to sup over the hidden 
corpse of their victim. Before then, they seem a pair of 
hugely sophisticated sporting Oxford swells. 

This, in turn, only serves to heighten their own sense of 
unreality, their apartness from the real heartbeat of 
humanity. Whether this is sound psychologically or even 
politically correct, it is not for me to say. 

Suffice it to say that it gives Tristan Gemmill and James 
Buller an opportunity for some fine old fashioned 
histrionics and noble profile-tossing. Meanwhile, Anthony 
Head as a sort of upper class Angel of Dark Justice, stalks 
them with the pained hauteur and mordant wit of a man who 
seems to envy the fate of the corpse inside the chest. Not 
until his final valedictory speech are we entirely sure 
where his sympathies will lie even if the truth is 
discovered. Good old fashioned melodrama with a freshly 
fashioned gloss.  



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