Daily Telegraph, 13 April 1994, by Charles Spencer
"The Arts: Killing for kicks THEATRE Rope still has the power 
to shock"
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Patrick Hamilton wrote *Rope* (1929) at the age of 24, and 
for more than 30 years it kept him in the heroic quantities 
of booze that were eventually to kill him.

In Keith Baxter's memorably creepy revival at Wyndham's 
Theatre, it still seems a profoundly shocking piece.

In a Mayfair flat, two Oxford undergraduates kill one of 
their contemporaries with a length of rope before hiding 
the body in a large chest. It is "a bloodless, clueless and 
fruitless" murder. They then hold a little supper party, 
using the chest as a dining table, for a number of guests 
including their victim's father. Though Hamilton always 
denied it, the play was almost certainly based on the 
famous 1924 Leopold and Loeb "killing for kicks" case in 
America.

At times the melodrama becomes more than a little strident. 
But Baxter and his fine cast succeed in making this old 
warhorse seem memorably modern. In the original, the 
homosexual relationshiop between the two killers, Brandon 
and Granillo, was only implied. Baxter makes it explicit, 
with an opening tableau in murky half-light in which three 
naked bodies are entwined like an erotic sculpture. It is 
only after a few minutes that we realise--with a horrid 
jolt--that one of them is dead. Following Stephen 
Milligan's death, the relationship between sex and 
strangulation seems horribly close to home.

But if this production is strong on sex, it is equally 
strong on style. Baxter and Co. beautifully capture the 
clipped accents and brittle panache of the early 1930s (the 
play has been brought forward a couple of years to suggest 
parallels with Nazism). The more sympathetic characters at 
the macabre supper seem like bright young things from 
Wodehouse. The two killers, and their languidly camp 
mentor, Ruper Cadell, a "damnably good" poet who was badly 
injured in the Great War, suggest the unhealthy hothouse 
world of Anthony Blanche in *Brideshead Revisited.*

Anthony Head, earning belated forgiveness for those 
dreadful Gold Blend coffee commercials, is superb as the 
poet, a booze-addicted homosexual fop whose apparent 
frivolity masks a terrible sickness of both body and soul. 
Tristan Gemmill, as the leader of the two killers, is 
almost as good, his air of clipped, smart-assed superiority 
becoming increasingly insufferable as the evening wears on, 
while James Buller seizes all his many chances for carpet-
chewing hysteria as the less poised partner in crime.

Yet for all its technical merits, this is a show that 
leaves a particularly nasty taste in the mouth, one that 
will, I suspect, scupper it chances of a long run. Though 
the drama ends in the moralistic fashion of most thrillers, 
with the poet talking of "a blasphemy against life", the 
final impression of *Rope* is of its amorality and its 
cruelty. There is none of the compassion of Hamilton's 
finest novels, and his play turns the audience into uneasy 
voyeurs, at least part of us furtively hoping that the 
killers will get away with their crime.

But in the wake of the James Bulger case, killing for kicks 
seems an obscene basis for what even Hamilton admitted was 
no more than a night of entertainment. *Rope* remains the 
theatrical equivalent of a video nasty.  
Tickets: 071-867 1116 



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