Sunday Times, 24 April 1994, by John Peter
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There are three naked young men lying entangled with one 
another on the dimly lit stage. One of them is dead. The 
other two rise, tie up the body and put it in a chest. With 
this chilling opening tableau Keith Baxter sets the scene 
for his taut, nervy production of Patrick Hamilton's famous 
1929 thriller. It first opened at the Minerva, Chichester, 
last summer, and now fills the Wyndham's stage with a sense 
of aggression and claustrophobia. Technically, the question 
is who will find out what happened, and how; but Hamilton's 
real theme is crime and corruption. One thinks of the 
gratuitous crime as an example, perhaps *the* example, of 
pure amorality--which, as all nitpickers will know, is not 
the same as immorality. But it is not quite as simple as 
that. AndrŽ Gide, too, was interested in the idea of 
*l'acte gratuit,* but he was too fascinated by it to 
diagnose it. Hamilton, by contrast, understand it 
perfectly. Motiveless murder, the two killers are told, 
does have a motice: it is vanity. The central character of 
*Rope* is Rupert Cadell, the elegant, witty, brooding war 
hero (Anthony Head): his limp is a reminder of the mass 
killings that had been forced on people only a decade or so 
earlier, and his war reminiscences set the lurid plot in a 
harsh moral context. Baxter's production is tense, elegant, 
brutal and febrile: the murder is seen as part of a 
reckless, compulsive homosexual lust. The tone of the 
dialogue is ironic but never arch or mocking. Tristan 
Gemmill and James Buller are the two killers: muscular, 
decandent young thugs. The whole thing holds you in a cold, 
steely grip.


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