Time Out, 20 April 1994, by Steve Grant
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Keith Baxter's revival of Patrick Hamilton's famous 
thriller opens with three named young men lying on the 
floor in a pyramid. Two get up, the other one is dead. At 
this point the evening goes downhill at a pace far quicker 
than that managed by the average motor vehicle on the roads 
in 1929, the year in which the piece was written. Hamilton 
was a very fine writer, a Marxist and a lush, whose 
posthumous neglect has been mightily rectified in recent 
years. But though his play *Gaslight* and several of his 
novels are likely to endure, *Rope* has never been one of 
his best (Hitchcock ballsed up the film version).

While the Nietzschean storyline (of two posh young men who 
kill a friend for kicks and then proceed to throw a dinner 
party on the trunk which contains his corpse) has 
possibility, the writing flags until well into the second 
half when there's an impressive defence of the sanctity of 
life. This is a bit much given the deadness of so much that 
has gone before. Too many anachronistic exchanges, false 
pauses and dud jokes are only too well matched by acting, 
which never gets above the level of Harry Enfield's Mr. 
Cholmondley-Warner.

Tristan Gemmill in the part of murderous protagonist 
Wyndham Brandon looks superb, but his voice sounds as if he 
was coached by a Harrow-educated speak-your-weight machine, 
while Debra Beaumont and Dawn Keeler play brainless 
caricatures that would offend the sensibilities of Bernard 
Manning. Indeed, the only bright spot is Anthony Head as 
the arty Rupert Cadell, a crippled war veteran who turns on 
the precocious pair after picking up a rather pathetic 
clue, and who interrupts an act of rampant homosexual 
groping with which the director vainly seeks to beef up 
proceedings. Head is the man in televisions's famous Gold 
Blend ad and, to signal a change in direction, he has a new 
hairdo, a walking stick, and effete accent and a limp--
everything, in fact, but an eye-patch and a parrot on his 
shoulder. But at least he tries, Ropey.



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