Mail on Sunday, 17 April 1994, by Louise Doughty
-----------------------------------------------------------

You know what is going to happen in *Rope* at the Wyndham's 
Theatre, even if you haven't seen the Hitchcock film. There 
is an inexorable morality in Patrick Hamilton's play which 
decrees its two aristocratic anti-heroes are going to meet 
a miserable end. Brandon and Granillo commit murder as a 
sort of intellectual experiment, and the obscenely comic 
dinner party they hold just after the event is a masterful 
set piece of absurdity. Anthony Head is brilliant as the 
tortured poet Cadell, half in love with Brandon and 
fighting the growing realisation that he is a monster.

Hamilton's talent lay in combining the conventions of 
English drawing-room farce with an exploration of 
Nietzschean nihilism. Evil is rarely so refined in real 
life, but it still makes for compulsive stage drama.



-----------------------------------------------------------
                     Bentley's Bedlam
            http://www.BetsyDa.com/bedlam.html

This website is for information and entertainment purposes only 
and is not intended to infringe on copyrights held by others.