What's On, 20 April 1994, by David Clark
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Purely for the thrill of it, cultured intellectual 
undergraduates Brandon and Granillo murder a younger fellow 
student and place his body in a trunk. In a macabre and 
dangerous gesture, they then invite a group of people 
(including the victim's relatives) to eat a meal on top of 
his imprompty coffin. Will they get away with hit? 
Certainly one can see what attracted Alfred Hitchcock to 
make his rather stagey film version of this strangely 
modern 1929 thriller. But Hitchcock's adaptation was tame 
compared to director Keith Baxter's heavily spiced-up 
production,which begins with three naked men lying on the 
floor in the half-light--one of them being the other two's 
newly-murdered victim.

Baxter has given the original text of this psychological 
thriller a philosophical slant and has brought the play's 
implicit homosexuality to the fore. In an uneven cast, 
Tristan Gemmill has the ideal blend of cruelty and 
sophistication for playing Brandon, although James Buller's 
portrayal of edge, tense Granillo sometimes seems overdone. 
Despite the oddity of his casting, Anthony Head turns in a 
good central performance as Rupert Cadell, the Wildean 
aesthete with a gammy leg who provides the play's moral 
voice--although whether this exposure will be enough to 
shake off the smoothie image gained from his famous 
appearances in the Gold Blend commercials remains to be 
seen.

The play has an odd construction: parts of the piece are 
far too slow and there are long periods in which actors 
have to hold the stage by themselves by just walking around 
looking tense or perplexed while the rest of the cast are 
having a good time offstage. In these moments the tension 
seems on the brink of collapsing into boredom, but this 
production certainly has its fair share of striking and 
inventive scenes and Simon Higlett's design (with the huge 
brown trunk and the blood-red curtains emphasised by the 
pale grey set) contributes greatly to the rehabilitation of 
this "forgotten" play. But the play's "message" is limited 
to the not-so-surprising conclusions that murder is a very 
bad thing and that Nietzsche's "Superman" theories are not 
meant to be acted out in real life. Beyond the window 
dressing of Baxter's imaginative production, *Rope* is more 
or less just an ordinary thriller.



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                     Bentley's Bedlam
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