Sunday Telegraph, 17 April 1994, by John Gross
"The Arts: Old rope shows signs of fraying"
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Patrick Hamilton's *Rope* is a superior melodrama--or, if 
you prefer, an inspired pot-boiler. Written when Hamilton 
was only 24, in 1929, it kept him in funds for the rest of 
his career. It deserved its success, and it still has the 
power to thrill. But it isn't serious, in the sense that 
Hamilton's novels are. If it raises interesting questions, 
it remains content to toy with them, and its psychological 
explorations never get beyond square one.

It is also, in some respects, unmistakably dated. The theme 
at the time, was an original one an English version of the 
Leopold and Loeb case, two Oxford undergraduates who commit 
a murder in order to demonstrate their freedom from 
commonplace moral restraints. But both the setting (a flat 
in Mayfair) and the characters come straight out of the so-
called Golden Age of the detective story, with its 
attendant unrealities. So does much of the dialogue. 
"Listen, I tell you." "What in Heaven's name do you think 
you're playing at?"--it is in terms like these that the 
characters tend to address one another in moments of 
stress.

None of which means that the play isn't worth reviving. But 
it needs to be taken on its own terms, as a period piece. A 
director is far more likely to produce the shivers at which 
Hamilton aimed if he sticks to the rules within which 
Hamilton worked.

From this point of view the production by Keith Baxter at 
Wyndham's Theatre could hardly get off to a worse start. It 
opens in the dark. We gradually make out three naked bodies 
(male) entwined on the floor. One of them turns out to be a 
corpse; the other two get up and bundle him into an antique 
wooden chest. Limbs and buttocks glimmer in the half-light.

It is a mistake to underline the homosexual motifs which 
Hamilton only hints at, of which he was perhaps only half-
aware. It is an even bigger mistake to violate the 
theatrical conventions of 1920 so crudely--as disruptive to 
the mood of the piece as it would be if the characters 
suddenly started using four-letter words.

The production takes time to recover; the opening scenes of 
the play itself, which include some fairly creaky 
exposition, are in any case rather slow. But Hamilton knew 
how to tighten the screws. The tension builds up as the 
killers serve dinner to their guests, using the chest as a 
table; it is reinforced by such devices as having two of 
the guests chatter away as they tie up a parcel with a 
length of rope--rope like the rope that was used to 
strangle the victim, rope like the rope on which the 
killers are liable to end up being hanged.

There is a satisfactory climax, too, in the long battle of 
wits, and wills, between Brandon, the dominant partner of 
the murder team, and Rupert, the guest who gradually 
sussses things out. Realistically considered, Rupert is an 
impossible amalgam of world-weary, 1890s-style poet 
("Damnably brilliant," we are told) and embittered First 
World War veteran. But as a piece of myth-making he is an 
intriguing, even a commanding figure, and he has one speech 
which is of a different order from anything else in the 
play: a meditation about London at night, and the hour at 
which "pleasure itself is found wanting", which really 
belongs to the world of Hamilton's novels.

At Wyndham's he is played by Anthony Head, who is equally 
admirable in all the requisite moods--languid, cynical, 
desolate, roused to action. The rest of the cast do well 
with their more predictable parts: Tristan Gemmill's 
Brandon in particular manages to suggest that the line 
between hubris and mere conceit is sometimes a thin one. I 
wasn't altogether sure about Simon Higlett's fashionably 
sloped and slanting set, but perhaps that is one 
anachronism we can accept.



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