Rope

Patrick Hamilton’s 1929 play Rope, about two university students who brazenly celebrate with an evening dinner party in London their success in having murdered a younger student to no end other than that of indulging their vanity in getting away with it, is thought to have its basis in a murder actually committed in Chicago in 1924 to the same end.  Both in real life and in the play, the culprits considered themselves examples of Nietzsche’s “superior men”, not to be confined by man-made laws.  Throughout the play, the prospect that the less confident of the two culprits may give them away through fear maintains tension between the murderers and keeps them fending off enquiries by their dinner guests.

There’s much to appreciate in REP’s production.  Its sumptuous, largely Victorian, set suggesting wealth, privilege, and entitlement lent a sense of the grandeur that the murderers plainly regarded as their due; and the chest hiding their victim’s body, in full view at the front of the stage throughout, left a versatile space for all the onstage action.

Subtle alterations in lighting and the use of incidental music, playing softly enough to retain its darker emotions, enhanced the changing mood perfectly, and the sounds of thunder and rain only made the mood more threatening.  Splendid costumes —juxtaposing the Roaring Twenties fashions of the younger generation with the staid formality of the older — perfectly set the tone of time and place.

As well, the acting itself was all you could ask for.  Well timed from its outset in the immediate aftermath of the murder to its gripping climax, the tension was palpable.  Under direction of Ed Wightman, with assistance by Liz de Totth, REP has produced a piece that it can certainly be proud of.

John P. Harvey

Images: Images (from top): [L–R] Pippin Carroll, Anne Freestone, and Saban Lloyd Berrell; [L–R] Josh Wiseman and Pippin Carroll and [L–R] Callum Wilson, Pippin Carroll, Ryan Street, and Ian Russell, in Rope. Photographer: John P. Harvey.