Independent, 13 April 1994, by Paul Taylor
Murder most horrid; Paul Taylor finds chilling parallels in 
Keith Baxter's production of Patrick Hamilton's *Rope* at 
Wyndham's 
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The marble figurine of a male nude has been turned so that 
it faces the wall, a cynically considerate touch in a play 
whose two principals don't go to similar lengths to spare 
the feelings of human beings. Through the silvery dusk, 
also posed like an art work, three more naked males can be 
discerned. You'd call it a *tableau vivant,* except that 
it's not so *vivant* as it turns out. The arrangement 
tricks you in a shuddery, sick-joke manner that a Webster 
or a Tourner would have relished. You suppose that, if any 
of them is dead, it's the one who is draped over the lap of 
the one sitting up against the large wooden chest, but then 
the prone body stirs and moves away, leaving the other two 
to flop forward, a piece of newly slaughtered meat.

Though its author Patrick Hamilton was at pains to deny it, 
his 1929 thriller *Rope* has long been supposed to have 
strong homosexual undercurrents, not least for its distinct 
similarities to the real-life Leopold and Loeb case. Like 
those two gay, conceitedly intelligent sons of Chicago 
millionaires, the couple of swanky Oxford undergrads in 
Hamilton's drama think they have concocted the perfect 
bloodless, clueless, motiveless murder, kidnapping and 
strangling an innocent fellow student.

They do so as a hartless, philosophical stunt. In 
sniggering contempt of lesser beings, they even throw a 
supper party on the corpse-conceiling chest, to which they 
invite the deceased's father and aunt.

Played on a set that depicts the Mayfair mansion flat in 
skewed Expressionist angles, Keith Baxter's fine production 
makes the erotic subtext quite explicit. In a moment of 
privacy and false security towards the end, the two 
murderers--the icity dominant Brandon (Tristan Gemmill) and 
his weaker, increasingly rattled disciple, Granillo (James 
Buller)--reveals the sexual kick they get out of the whole 
business by engaging in a spot of mutual strip-tease-and-
strangulation before hurling themselves in ravenous carnal 
abandonment on the top of the chest. By moving the play to 
1931, Baxter also tries to relate the youth's Nietzschean 
tendencies to the rise of Fascism in that "low dishonest 
decade."

It was service in the First World War that physically 
crippled and spiritually damaged the older friend and poet, 
who first suspects and then steels himself to expose 
Brandon and Granillo. A limping cross between Wilde and 
Hamlet, Rupert Cadell is played by the charismatic Anthony 
Head, who is better at the languid asperities and puzzled 
*hauteur* than the pained contradictions and quavery 
unbosomings. Rupert's war experience has left him with a 
sweeping cynicism about life, and to that extent his 
outlook chimes with that of the youths, but in him, it's 
just the obverse side of an abnormally acute sense of 
life's value. Sipping cigarettes, and with a deliberately 
goading air of superiority, he sets out to undermine 
Brandon's kinky bravado.

I started out thinking that the nearest contemporary 
equivalent of the case was the Menendez brothers' alleged 
killings in Los Angeles. But even if they are guilty, that 
crime is not motiveless. The closest paralle, you realise 
with a sick jolt, is the Bulger murder.

- 'Rope' continues at Wyndham's Theatre (Box office: 
071-867 1116) 



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