Financial Times, 12 July 1993, by Andrew St. George
Rope ensures a reputation - Theatre
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Few plays now can afford an actor the chance to say "You 
swine, you filthy swine" without causing a ripple of mirth 
in the theatre. But those closing lines of Patrick 
Hamilton's taut psychological thriller, *Rope*, ring like a 
tocsin round the Minerva Theatre, Chichester, where Keith 
Baxter has successfully revived the 1929 classic.

*Rope* shows how two Oxford undergraduates, Brandon and 
Granillo, murder their friend Ronald. They conceal the body 
in a chest, and invite Ronald's father, aunt and assorted 
friends to dine off the same chest. But one of the guests, a 
*louche* poet called Rupert Cadell, discovers their perfect 
and motiveless crime.

Stage time and theatre time are identical. After two hours, 
the dinner service is cleared, and the questions from Rupert 
become more probing. Before Brandon and Granillo can make 
off with the body, Rupert returns, confronts them, and 
wrings a confession.

Hamilton's writing is everywhere detailed, the stage 
directions punctilious: "He responds vaguely, as one who has 
only half understood." Yet it is also powerful, making 
psychological sense of the "foul, lewd and infamous jest," 
fashioning a drama of Jacobean scope and Jonsonian bravado. 
The play moves the thriller genre into drama, but does so by 
avoiding the whodunnit formula.

The direction (Keith Baxter) serves the purpose exactly. 
Each time new information arrives, the situation and the 
characters change. The opening, completely dark except for 
the two actors' glowing cigarettes which identify them, is 
all tension and uncertainty: "Do you think we'll get away 
with it?" The dinner-party performance which follows manages 
to maintain the sense that Brandon and Granillo are both 
acting and reacting as circumstances change. The action 
sprawls over the false-perspective set, a thunder storm 
worrying at the murderers throughout.

The acting of the three principals keeps pace with the 
subtleties of Hamilton's plot. Brandon (John Barrowman) 
differentiates himself neatly from the less expansive and 
murch surlier Granillo (Alexis Denisof). Throughout the 
party, both indulge the thrill of a healthy crime and the 
*sprezzatura* of its execution. Both characters drink 
heavily, and at times stagger round the stage like bleary 
bachelors at a stag party. But their interchanges have an 
excitement and breathlessness born naturally out of their 
situation.

Rupert (Anthony Head) is all fastidiousness and frolic, a 
cultured creature already world-weary and bored, but witty 
enough to know it: "Of course I honour my parents. I send 
them a telegram of congratulations each year on my 
birthday." Whether the killers will hang depends on his 
attitude, a kind of late nineteenth-century decadence which 
finds its own moral standards when pressed. Head has the 
character down, fiddling at a cigarette, twitching at his 
cloak.

Elsewhere Simon Chadwick and Debra Beaumont are perfect as 
the hooray guests, while Richard Warwick adds commendatorial 
weight as the victim's father, Sir Johnstone Kentley.

Hitchcock adapted Hamilton's play in 1948, and it has 
remained a classic for exactly the reasons which mark its 
success here: it is, like Hamilton's other plays, tense, 
uneasy and psychologically acute. Hamilton died at 58 in 
1962. His neglected fame should hang on more than just 
*Rope*.

Minerva Theatre, Chichester, until 7 August 



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