Rope
Almeida Theatre, London
I am not advocating the return of capital punishment, but theatre surely lost something when murderers no longer had fear for their own lives. The noose is surely what killers Brandon and Granillo would have been given in Patrick Hamilton’s 1927 play, Rope.
Brandon and Granillo are two Oxford undergraduates who take the Nietzschean concept of being held accountable to no man-made laws, and decide to put theory into practice by strangling a fellow student.
But this is only part of the experiment. They hold a party that evening and choose carefully who to invite. The dead student’s father is one as he creates wonderful irony, his painfully-shy sister another; representative of the new vacuous age are the vacuous Raglan and Leila; providing the only risk of discovery is the clever but cynical poet, Cadell. The regular table is not in use, so in the centre of the room is a chest. Inside the chest is the dead body.
The ineligibility of the regular table is due to the fact that it is laden with books. Brandon, you see, has been left a library collection and Sir Johnstone Kentley, father of the murdered boy, is there to peruse and take some of them, his interest in the written word making him blind to reality. Books are also what Cadell writes, if only little-read poetry anthologies. Yet for all his erudition, Cadell needs the crutch of alcohol as well as a real crutch due to a leg amputated during the Great War. Raglan and Phoebe are interested in books of a frivolous kind (poor PG Wodehouse, alas, takes a knock here) and films.
Cinema and cinema-going are further lambasted by Brandon (especially) as symptomatic of the banality of life in the 1920s. People wanted to forget the Great War and take escape in enjoyment. This accords well with Nietzsche’s description of the “herd”, where the masses do not think for themselves but are led. Why not commit the ultimate crime – murder – if only to emphasise the fact that you are alive?
Analogies can be found between the ’20s and the superficialities of the present day. But analogies are not something this production wants to emphasise. It is a period drama, the costumes and mannerisms reflecting the time.
Nietzsche has taken a battering since the Second World War. In the ’20s, his anti-state views, however, appeared radical in the light of the carnage inflicted the previous decade. Indeed, Cadell refers to war as legalised murder.
Pity to a Nietzschean is an emotion associated with weakness. Yet pity is given considerable weight here. That is the one thing that made me unsure of this play – the debate is so skewered against the duo. Is that because I see it from the vantage point of the early 21st century? Could an earlier audience have had more sympathy for the killers? Or would the strictures of the Ten Commandments – so viciously derided by Cadell – have meant that they would get little understanding throughout?
This proviso apart, it is a superb evening’s entertainment. The acting is top quality. I particularly liked Phoebe Waller-Bridge as the trivial Leila and Bertie Carvel for the acerbic wit of Cardel. The Almedia’s leading lights seem to alternate a modern play with an older one – they’ve certainly chosen a good oldie here.
Richard Woulfe
