Plays International, June 1994, by David Jays ----------------------------------------------------------- "Puts the Homo back into Homicide" was a teasing slogan for Tom Kalin's film *Swoon* (1992), based on the notorious 1924 Chicago murder of their fellow-student by lovers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. An eerily beautiful movie, it followed necessarily less explicit versions of the tale, including Patrick Hamilton's *Rope* (1929, re-worked and filmed by Hitchcock in 1948). Hamilton denied knowledge of the Chicago case but few have believed him--like his protagonists, he leaves too many clues lying around. Here Brandon and Granillo are Oxford bloods who invite guests, including their victim's father, to dine on a chest containing the strangled boy. Will they be detected, will they swing? Homosexuality is central to *Swoon's* concerns but it was always there in *Rope*, although no-one is crude enough to mention it directly. Instead it whispers it in the sub-text, insinuates through Hamilton's stage directions, with their suspicion of the murderer's over-attentive grooming and dress. In Keith Baxter's production (a belated transfer from Chichester), Brandon and Granillo do more than drop the odd hairpin--Baxter outs them decisively in the opening tableau of three half-lit nudes entwined in an apparently post- coital slump. One body topples lifeless to the ground: sex and murder confirm their date for the evening. Baxter's problem is that the more explicit his interpolations, the more bizarre is the absence of gay desire in the dialogue. Brandon and Granillo's becomes the love the dare not speak its name, but which trails a foot in tender menace over a lover's torso or enjoys a gratingly topical auto-asphyxiating snog. Kalin's contemporary narrative locates the murder in private erotic rituals of barter and forfeit, transgression breeding at society's margins. Even among themselves, however, Hamilton's characters speak only of the quest for "an inmaculate murder...for the sake of danger and for the sake of killing," and later of a Nietzchean act of daring. Hamilton uses homosex to cast a lurid glow on the deed, but for Baxter it is a spotlight beam of illumination. It may give this efficient if dated play an added kick, but the explicit homo-erotics are misleading. The knowledge that the pair are kink-kitten lovers is insufficient to explain how murder fits into their relationship. Hamilton doesn't give them enough personality for that, and nor do Baxter's actors. Physically, they are well-cast--Tristan Gemmill (Brandon) is a pugilist contained in a smooth cream suit and the palest pink waistcoat, while James Buller's increasingly nervy Granillo sways on the sloping stage like a reed about to break. Vocally, however, they are monotonous--indeed, apart from Richard Warwick's sad and understated father, everyone brays and quacks in clenched, vowel-deforming accents. The steep rake of the stage, and the need to keep people moving during the duff party chatter means that the production's choreography is more arresting: Simon Chadwick's half-wit hearty bounces like a pogo-stick; Debra Beaumont's deb totters about like a penguin in a pierrot troupe. *Rope* is a play of situation, not of character: it is the getting-warmer circling around the crime that grips, the macabre, *Titus Andronicus* chill of Brandon referring to a "chest from which we're going to feed." Simon Higlett's set is appropriately skewed, grey walls set off by deep red curtains, a huge slanting window casting a murky green shadow over the ceiling (lighting by Bill Bray). Baxter's production is full of details to tempt a shudder or nudge-- Brandon doing press-ups on the chest, or crooning Kern's "They'd never believe me"with Granillo. Some details nudge too pointedly. The action is moved to 1931, sot hat a wireless bulletin can casually remind us that Hitler is on the horizon. The link between homosexual and psycho is troubling enough: adding fascism to the brew (picking up on the pair's Nietzschean justification) is clumsily unpleasant, unless of course you believe that from queer to killer to genocide is but a short step along Sodom High Street. The play is already moralistic enough (or, as a recent *Daily Telegraph* feature has it, "The good news is that *Rope* has a *Dixon of Dock Green* ending"). The moral is mediated through the murderers' friend Rupert (Anthony Head), decadent poet and sniper at convention (even smoking coloured cigarettes), his disillusion shaped by the horror of the Great War in which he was wounded. Head's eye- catching performance evokes shell-shock sheltering behind amoral urbanity--even Wildean epigrams are delivered in a hollow voice racked with nerves, his jaw tense, his cheek sunken. He moves the play from sophisticated flirting with transgression to an outraged avowal of decency: The evening ends on a blast from a policeman's whistle, shrill with the terror of convention manning the barricades. ----------------------------------------------------------- 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.