Rope - Almeida Theatre

Rope by Patrick Hamilton, Almeida Theatre, Feb 3.

Patrick Hamilton's first major stage success was first performed in 1929, as the Jazz Age reached its decadent height and the crash and depression were soon to follow upon. It takes as its starting point Nietzsche's idea that there is no good and evil, just human perceptions of them and so anything is allowed. Thus two Oxford students murder another for the sake of it and then organize a party with the corpse in a chest at the centre of it as an attempt at audacious bravura before disposing of it.

The Almeida's production, being 'in the round' gave everybody a different view of the action but the movement of the actors throughout meant that it wasn't a limiting factor from anyone's particular viewpoint. It was not perhaps as much of a thriller as one might have thought, lacking tension but gaining much in humour and character acting. Hamilton's career might have trailed off to a sad parody of itself and then nothing at all in his last years but this comes from his early years and contains some of his sharpest writing.

The acting is fine throughout with Blake Ritson and Alex Waldmann as the accomplices in murder, Brandon and Granillo; Henry Lloyd-Hughes is a fine, dithering toff; Philip Arditti the excellnt butler; Phoebe Waller-Bridge is as vacuous a party animal as the flapper generation could have produced and Michael Elwyn (coincidentally the father of the dead body) and Emma Dewhurst completed the cast but Bertie Carvel as the aesthete, poet with well-founded suspicions, Rupert is the main feature. In the same way as I recently saw again Jonathan Pryce as Lytton Strachey completely overshadow Emma Thompson as Dora Carrington in the film Carrington, it is perhaps not the main protagonist who makes the show the success that it is.

Fixing the murderers with his baleful eye and expressing himself in the most precise and erudite terms, Carvel's Cadell (pictured) is a treat. When asked how his poetry and 'big work' is going, he replies,

Indeed, it promises to be not only the best thing I have ever written, but the best thing I have ever read.

Brandon and Granillo are psychopaths, the dark underside of the Jazz Age and will hang. The play, at least in this renewal, is a study of such psychology rather than a suspense drama but it is none the worse for that. The Almeida is a great little theatre, too. I'm afraid there's hardly any time left to see the play which ends on Saturday but I can at least recommend the theatre. Do go.