Patrick Hamilton’s 1929 play Rope is theatrically less famous than the author’s other macabre work, Gaslight, and mostly known thanks to Alfred Hitchcock’s unfortunate 1948 screen version; this itself is mostly remembered as an experiment in cinematic technique, in which Hitchcock wanted to give the impression of having shot in just one sequence. The story is linear: two extremely well-bred and educated young men, who call each other by their surnames, Brandon and Granillo, decide to apply their version of Nietzschean philosophy to life, and demonstrate that they are beyond good and evil by killing a third young man who is at university with them. They then invite his parents and a couple of other friends for dinner in their elegant city flat, where they serve them food on the chest in which they have hidden the body.

If you have seen the movie, you will probably not have been hugely impressed with the plot nor with the dialogue. Hitchcock moved the scene from England to New York, and suffocated the original homosexual tension between the two protagonists for obvious Hollywood reasons - Hamilton’s play having been inspired by the infamous case of Leopold and Loebb, two young lovers from Chicago who had murdered a 14-year old boy as an experiment in morality.

Roger Michell’s elegant and fluid revival at the Almeida recovers both the sexuality and the setting of Hamilton’s play. Brandon and Granillo’s flat is in Mayfair, but they study in Oxford; this is not a secondary detail, as it carries the rarefied, decadent atmosphere of charming and witty evenings of folly that would be stigmatised fifteen years later in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (Waugh had been an Oxford student roughly in the same years during which Hamilton’s play is set). The characters’ accents, clothes and habits speak of them before we get to know them, and situate them within a very different social and cultural context, which modifies our perception of the nature of their crime. It also makes the central part of the play much funnier, as a delightful commentary on the uses and language of British aristocrats, à la Oscar Wilde, of the twentieth
century. But the really different and most brilliant element in Michell’s production is the character of Rupert Cadell.

Rupert is one of Brandon and Cardillo’s common friends and a guest at their dinner party; he is an intellectual, disillusioned man who reads Nietzsche himself and who lost a leg to World War I. Hamilton entrusts Rupert with the play’s unintrusive message that war is nothing but legalised murder, and that all the generations of young men forced to destroy and pillage the young men of another country for the decisions of higher political powers will be irredeemably scarred, deprived of limbs and ethical beliefs. In Hitchcock’s movie, Rupert was played by the wholesome, clean-faced James Stewart, who does not have an ounce of malice in him, and who ends up being a secondary character to John Dall’s charismatic Brandon. At the Almeida, Rupert is inhabited and transformed through a memorable performance by Bertie Carvel, whose presence on the stage illuminates Hamilton’s dialogue and builds up the final scene to exquisite tension, in spite of how clearly we had seen things coming.

Truth be told, the whole cast is impressive. Phoebe Waller-Bridge is amusing and adorable as the flapper Leila, Alex Waldmann is a flustered and screaming and blushing Granillo, Michael Elwyn is a very touching, believable Sir Kentley, and Blake Ritson as Brandon, if being occasionally too in love with himself, successfully manages a couple of sociopathic gazes that are genuinely chilling. But Carvel’s Rupert, from the moment he steps into the room, literally steals the scene and becomes the one we always want to be on stage - he becomes, also, the protagonist, shifting the balance of the action to what, interestingly, might have been Hamilton’s original intention, but is usually lost in productions that are too influenced by Hitchcock’s version.

Incidentally, this is also the Almeida’s first production in the round, and it serves very efficiently the real-time development of the play - the sense of participation and reality it evokes is almost a theatrical equivalent of Hitchcock’s one-take trompe l’oeil. Mark Thompson’s set is, however, a bit too innocuous, with a few simple chairs at the borders of the room, quite reminiscent of Rob Howell’s in-the-round dining room for last year’s Old Vic production of The Norman Conquests. The one interesting addition appears to be a glass cupola that serves the introduction of a rain storm. The burning fireplace allows Rick Fisher’s lighting to heighten the darkness of the first scenes, with a series of shakingly lit matches and glowing cigarette tips that make the murder aftermath lyrically gothic.

Michell’s revival seems particularly apt for a time of the year when most people are elbowing their way through Christmas parties and cocktails, and is a refreshing offer within the panto, family-friendly festive season. Hamilton’s play might not be the most experimental or challenging work of its time, but in this production it is more than worth seeing, if only for its abundant show of talent.

Till 6 February 2010