Times Literary Supplement, 29 April1994, by Sean French "Nietzschean tea on a dead man's chest, yo ho" ----------------------------------------------------------- Patrick Hamilton told his brother Brude that he had written *Rope*, almost casually, "scribbled on old envelopes and odd scraps of paper in saloon bars and small Lyons teashops." He was always mildly dismissive of his first play, partly, perhaps, because it was achieved with such ease. His sister Lalla was an actress, and immediately recognized the work's potential. She showed it to the theatrical producer Reginald Denham, and *Rope* opened in the West End in July 1929, when Hamilton was only twenty-five. This, with the publication of his first novel, *The Midnight Bell*, in June of the same year, established Hamilton's reputation and made him relatively wealthy. It would take a quarter of a century of heavy drinking to make him short of money, but *Rope*, with his later success, *Gaslight*, would continue to pay the bills, and both plays are still being performed by amateur and provincial companies around the world. *Rope* is well suited for amateur production, both because of it s faults and because of its one great strength. The play's genius lies in its central idea. Dominating the stage is a chest containing a recently murdered young man. The man''s murderers, two young undergraduates, then invite friends, including the boy's father, to tea, which they serve on the chest itself. The play is haunted by what has occurred before it beings, by the one object on stage that we can't see. The sensation of the play at the time (it was seen as almost inconceivably shocking) was of a horror play that dispensed with all the apparatus of *grand guignol*, "the incessant round of throat-slicings, eye-gougings, thumb-screwings, floggins, beatings, braintwisting, charred bodies and the like," as Hamilton himself ennumerated with some relish. Most of what we do see is thoroughly routine, but within the conscious limitations of the play this doesn't necessarily matter. However stereotyped the characters (the flapper, the buffoon, the fop who comes good), however inane much of the dialogue provided for them (so inferior to the dialogue in *The Midnight Bell*) there is always our creeping sense of the crime undermining this false sense of normality. A West End revival must find more to the play than this, in order to justify itself, and Keith Baxter's new production plausibly brings the play's repressed homoerotic theme to the surface. The Hamilton brothers were themselves evasively conscious of this. In his introduction to the published text, Patrick disclaimed any interest in "morbid psychologies." In his memoir of his brother, Bruce praised the original "first murderer," Brian Aherne, for his strength: "His powerful masculinity was needful, for with a weaker Brandon *Rope* is, rather curiously, apt to seem like a play about homosexuals." Not very curiously at all, in fact, because the play is based on the Leopold and Loeb murder of 1924, in which two young and brillian homosexual lovers had kidnapped a young boy and murdered him as a demonstration of their own Nietzchean superiority to conventional morals. Alfred Hitchcock's film version (which Patrick Hamilton hated) brought this out by filming the opening murder as an obvious metaphor for illicit homosexual sex. Baxter opens even more arrestingly, with three entangled nude male bodies. Ronald Kentley has, we infer, been killed as part of a sado- masochistic sexual act. The two men then dress in order to receive their guest. At the close of the evening, when they seem to have triumphed, the two men feverishly embrace on top of the chest itself and begin to tear at each other's clothing, aroused by the crime, the proximity of the course and the act of deception that we have just witnessed, performed in real time. These scenes are powerfully effective. The problem lies with what comes between, with the text and action of the play itself. There is only one sequence of dialogue in *Rope* that shows Hamilton at anything like his best. When the murdered boy's father leaves at the end of the evening, we see an old man confused between different impulses: remembering and forgetting the books he has been presented with, grateful to his hosts, arranging transport home and, behind it all, starting to get worried about his absent son. It is subtly done by Hamilton--and well performed here by Richard Warwick--and we get our sole authentic sense of the human cost of what has been done. The accuracy and skill of this production largely expose the limitations of the play. Tristan Gemmill and James Buller are competent enough as the two young murderers but it is Hamilton's fault, not theirs, that the characters remain inert. The playwright almost willfully deprives them of interesting attributes. Hitchcock, who, with the help of Hume Cronyn and Arthur Laurents, rewrote every word of the script, was much more alive to the clash of grisly comedy and agonizing hysteria in the two young men, but even he could do nothing with the character of Rupert Cadell, played by James Stewart on screen and now by Anthony Head, as the apparently Nietzschean amoralist who discovers and exposes the crime. In the film he makes no sense at all, though Hamilton seems to have conceived him as a combination of Rupert Brooke and the Scarlet Pimpernel. Head is flamboyantly effective in a role which Hamilton provided with rather too many "bits of business." It's an enjoyable performance, appropriately old- fashioned in style. Like the play, this production works best through what is not said, what is absent from the text, and if the dialogue is not actually to be rewritten, then that is unavoidable. The force of *Rope*, such as it remains, suggests that it was not that Patrick Hamilton ws uninterested in "delving into morbid psychologies" but that he was fearful of what his delving might uncover. This revelation he kept largely for his novels. ----------------------------------------------------------- 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.