Independent on Sunday, 24 April 1994, by Irving Wardle
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The horror of Patrick Hamilton's 1929 thriller, *Rope*, is 
one peculiar to this century: namely the discovery that 
culture and higher education may enhance the human capacity 
for cruelty. Had Hamilton's two undergraduate murderers not 
had the advantage of reading Nietzsche, along with enjoying 
Beethoven on the gramophone, then their friend Ronald would 
not be lying dead in a chest, as proof of their superior 
powers of daring. It is a tricky play. The plot suggests a 
piece of intellectual baiting for the philistine public; 
but, as usual with Hamilton, a pop outline contains an 
elitist texture--and it is the poet Rupert, decadent 
aesthete *par excellence*, who emerges as the avenging 
instrument of common moral outrage.

In Keith Baxter's fine production the implied homosexual 
pact between the two killers is made fully explicit; 
pointedly showing that, while the lordly Brandon (Tristan 
Gemmill) organises the crime, it is the jittery Granillo 
(James Buller) who takes the lead in their erotic 
strangulation games. It also strengthens their supposed 
bond with Rupert (Anthony Head) as a possible co-
conspirator to see him bestowing fond kisses on his hosts 
at the macabre party. With no slackening of tension, the 
production is dense with wider associations as jazz-age and 
public-school manners mingle with fascist dandyism in the 
dance round the coffin. Head plays the limping Rupert as a 
sweet-faced boy who turns even the most waspish lines into 
a caress. You can believe in him as a poet: he can make 
Hamilton sound like T S Eliot. More to the point, his 
reversal from apathetic melancholy into ferocious action, 
reveals the character as one of Hamlet's most notable 
descendants.



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