New Statesman & Society, 15 April 1994, by Carole Woddis
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"I am always eager to step forward and defend anything which 
I believe not to be disgusting (but which other people do) 
just as I am always eager to step forward and denounce 
anything which other people believe not to be disgusting 
(but which I do)". At a time of increasing concern about the 
influence of certain images on vulnerable minds, those words 
of the maverick author and playwright Patrick Hamilton seem 
like a sly trick to come back and taunt us with. A revival 
of Hamilton's 1929 melodrama *Rope* has opened this week at 
Wyndham's Theatre in a highly charged homoerotic account 
directed by Keith Baxter, first performed last summer in 
Chichester. It is a production that not only takes liberties 
with Hamilton's intentions, but is also deeply disquieting. 

I happened to see it one afternoon in Guildford with my 
fairly unshockable 78-year-old mother. It was as disturbing 
an experience as I can remember. I came away with the 
profound sense that, albeit unwittingly, Baxter's production 
of this 65-year-old play fed the worst homophobic tendencies 
of our society. 

*Rope*, you may remember, is the story of an apparently 
motiveless murder. Two Nietzsche-influenced Oxford 
undergraduates murder a third for no apparent reason other 
than to prove a) their intellectual superiority and b) that 
they can commit the perfect crime. 

Baxter's production, it seemed to me, had sensationally made 
explicit what had previously remained implicit--a feeling 
shared perhaps by the man who shouted "rubbish" and stormed 
out at Guildford. This was not, I think, because he was 
appalled by the passionate love-making between the two men 
but because he didn't care for what the production was 
implying: a dangerously overwrought fusion of evil with 
homoeroticism. 

Hamilton always claimed the story was his own. But many at 
the time and since (including Sean French in his recent 
biography) agree with the present director that he was 
influenced by the Loeb/Leopold case. In 1924, two 
privileged, extremely bright New York college students had 
murdered a young boy in similar circumstances. 

What has never been in dispute is the latent homosexuality 
suggested in the play. Hitchcock's 1948 film also made more 
evident what had only been hinted at in the original; little 
wonder that Hamilton was never very keen on it. So why has 
Baxter upped the homosexual voltage? Pure sensationalism? 
Theatrical licence--an updating to accord with today's 
lifestyles? (There's even a touch of simulated strangulation). 

Whatever the motive, the effect is unnerving. For Hamilton's 
melodrama is no mere pot-boiler. It has at its centre a 
bristling moral integrity in the shape of Rupert Cadell, the 
disillusioned, sardonic, battle-scarred poet, wonderfully 
played by Anthony Head: the smooth-talking Romeo of the Gold 
Blend ads. 

His final indictment of the two murderers, according to this 
production, implicitly includes condemnation of their sexual 
as much as their intellectual mores. Through him, you feel 
the full weight of society's repulsion and hostility. "You 
will hang because of what you have done," cries Cadell. 

For its author, with his pacifist and Stalinist sympathies, 
this indictment carried clear class overtones--directed 
against the drooling, Brideshead-inclined English 
upperclasses. However, this production tightens the link 
between the murderers' criminal, amoral behaviour and their 
homosexuality. Baxter may or may not have intended that 
result. But give a man an inch and he'll take a mile. That 
seems to be what has happened here. 

Hamilton, as it happens, might have sided more with Baxter 
than with me. In a later preface, he upheld the right of the 
author to create horror as a "perfectly healthy and 
legitimate stimulant ... If I have succeeded, you will leave 
the theatre braced and recreated." Unfortunately, I didn't. 
Others may have been more fortunate. 



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