I admit to a rush of guilty pleasure when it was announced that the Almeida had chosen Rope for its seasonal offering. It arrived with childhood flashbacks of a Sunday afternoon in front of the telly gripped by the Hitchcock film and enthralled — and appalled — by the ruthlessness of the conceit, that killing can be a creative act, and that murder can be a civilising influence.
I would have been even more fascinated had I known that the film was based, via Patrick Hamilton’s play, on real events.
Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were students from wealthy Chicago families. The arrogant young men, still in their late teens, hit on the notion that to kill and get away with it would be the height of sophistication.
“We have committed passionless and motiveless murder,” declares the icy Brandon (Blake Ritson) to his accomplice Granillo (Alex Waldmann) in the play.
You need to read that line with pre-war, public school, English upper- middle-class diction. For Hamilton turned the cold-blooded Americans into blue-blooded Brits. (Although for Hitchcock’s 1948 movie starring Jimmy Stewart, screenwriter Arthur Laurents turned them back again, setting the film in New York).
Hamilton resorts to artifice to stoke up the tension
Roger Michell’s uninterrupted 90-minute production evokes London with the drum of torrential rain beating down on a domed skylight above. With Mark Thompson’s in-the-round production (the Almeida’s first) there is no opportunity here to locate the play. Hitchcock did it with a moment of cinematic bravura by sweeping open the apartment curtains to reveal the New York skyline. It was one of those classic Hitchcock painted backdrops that today would be too stagy even for the stage. The sense here is of a dullish basement, despite the skylight.
And of course, Hamilton not only changed the location, but the weapon of choice. His killers strangle their victim with the eponymous rope. Leopold and Loeb hacked theirs to death with a chisel. He might have thought a play called Chisel sounded too DIY. Or that the method lacked the cold-blooded intimacy of strangulation.
Whatever his reason, there is, by the way, a strange off-stage coincidence about this play. The real-life killers were defended by renowned attorney Clarence Darrow who is also connected to another recent London production that was based on a true story, Inherit the Wind. In that play, revived at the Old Vic, Kevin Spacey played Drummond, a stage version of Darrow who defended a Tennessee teacher for the crime of teaching children evolution.
In Rope, Darrow doesn’t get a look in. Hamilton sets the action over the course of one evening and one location where nerveless Brandon and the gibbering Granillo host a party to add “piquancy” to their crime.
The guests include the victim’s father, played with touching kindliness by Michael Elwyn, and their supercilious friend Rupert Cadell. The latter (played by an outstanding Bertie Carvel) is not only Brandon’s equal in arrogance but, it turns out, his superior in intelligence. Will he become suspicious about the locked chest? Will he detect that his hosts have something to hide?
Of course he does. Otherwise it would be a very dull party indeed.
Yet this Rope is not as taut an evening as you might expect for a thriller in which the victim’s body lies centre stage, albeit stuffed into an ornate chest. Not only that, the plotting is decidedly frayed and aside for some Wildean epigrams delivered by Rupert, the dialogue is, well, ropey.
Hamilton never quite finds a way to stoke up the tension of possible discovery without resorting to artifice. We take for granted Brandon’s high intellect, but you have to wonder how bright this architect of the “perfect crime” really is when he chooses a partner with the nerves of a frightened deer.
Strangely, the suggestion of a homoerotic bond between these two is more explicit in Hitchcock’s 1948 film than in this revival. And the polite party conversation is so deliberately geared towards the evening’s secret, it wouldn’t be entirely out of place if between cocktails one of the guests blithely asked: “So Brandon, killed anyone recently?”
When Cadell bluntly asks his hosts if they have any rope, what he means is string to bind a parcel. As if anyone looking for string asks for rope. And even more obviously and apropos of not very much, one of the guests decides to play a game of lets-pretend-Brandon-has-murdered-someone and-put-the-body in the chest. Oh, and one of the other guests, a hooray Henry twit, it so happens looks remarkably like the victim. Moments such as these send Waldmann’s Granillo into yet more guilt-induced hysterics, and Ritson’s Brandon into ever more strained attempts to hide his partner’s guilt. The fun here is in watching him attempt to stop his partner in crime (and life?) losing his cool, while Carvel’s tetchy Rupert becomes increasingly suspicious.
Yet, a bit like the Hitchcock’s unreal painted backgrounds, our suspended disbelief never forces us to give up on this creaky piece. The reward is beautifully written speeches, from Rupert on the sanctity of life, and from Brandon on the bourgeois banality of rules.
Ultimately, Rope is rather like its main baddie, Brandon. It makes for an enjoyable evening, has lots of style, but is not quite as clever as it thinks it is.
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