Evening Standard, 12 April 1994, by Nicholas de Jongh
FRAYED ROPE STRAINS TO SUSPEND DISBELIEF; ROPE AT WYNDHAM'S 
THEATRE
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People who look to the theatre for very cheap thrills will 
find *Rope* sets them quivering like liberated jellies.

Consider its lingering line in shock-horror. You will be 
asked to believe a pair of Oxford undergraduates would 
happily give a Mayfair supper-party with guests seated 
round a chest in which is concealed the corpse of a young 
man murdered for fun by the hosts hours earlier.

Since life insists upon being stranger than dramatic 
fiction, I suppose you may just about accept this. But even 
with disbelief suspended, *Rope* leaves me cold--and not in 
the goose-pimple sense.

When premiered in 1929, this seething melodrama by young 
hot-shot novelist Patrick Hamilton was recknoed daring 
*grand guignol.* "I was revolted--it could only appeal to 
unpleasant and morbid minds," the Daily Telegraph critic 
wrote in one of the few dissenting notices.

But for once that reactionary reviewer had a point. 
Hamilton was inspired by the recent trial of Leopold and 
Loeb, two young gay lovers in America who had murdered a 
youth to protest their Nietzschean superman status. And 
*Rope* is a crude, anglicised version of the American 
original.

Keith Baxter's stylised and highly atmostpheric production 
begins by inserting an erotic tableau. In the murky light 
you glimpse Simon Higlett's vividly expressionistic grey 
set, with its crooked perspectives and sloping walls. And 
there beside the chest are sprawled the two naked 
murderers, Brandon and Granillo, with their dead, denuded 
victim.

This prelude, with its intimation of sexual assault or even 
necrophilia, gives the play a modern gloss. Hamilton left 
the homosexual motif uneasily alone, Baxter draws right 
into the open, with even a little sexual business atop the 
chest.

Yet all his tone-painting, vicious rain and operatic 
thunder, dance music and candlelight cannot disguise 
*Rope's* hollowness. The first act is pure--or rather 
impure--titillation, with Brandon and his anxious lover 
Granillo welcoming the smart set, including the dead man's 
father (Richard Warwick), a silly young flapper (Debra 
Beaumont) and Anthony Head as Rupert, an exquisite dandy-
poet, with a limp acquired in the War and a red waistcoat.

The corpse in the chest makes for small excitement. 
Suspense keeps on being cunningly suspended, despite a few 
suspiciously pregnant remarks. And even when the guests use 
the chest as a dining table, the tension is less than 
killing.

Rupert's discovery of a tell-tale music-hall ticket, which 
he eventually pins upon his lapel in a typical *grand 
guignol* gesture, precipitates the denouement and 
confession which leave us where we began--in the dark.

Baxter's gay emphases will delight homophobes but they do 
not help to explain the murderers' motivation. The 
performances of Tristan Gemmill's Brandon as the handsome, 
ice-cool leader and James Buller as Granillo, fighting down 
bouts of hysteria, are prettily skin-deep but nothing 
profounder.

And Anthony Head's Rupert, quaveringly supercilious and 
affected, tears passion to tatters in one of those whining 
cut-glass voices which thugs like to smash. Nearly 70 years 
on, *Rope* is rather frayed.



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