Have you seen Rope by Patrick Hamilton? You could have seen it in London,
England in 1929 or in 2009. How about in Ottawa in 1950? You missed that too? Where
is that time machine when you need it? You can see it at the Shaw Festival this
year. And that is a roundabout way of pointing out how rarely Rope is produced and tipping my
hat to the Shaw Festival for producing yet another rarity.
Rope is a whodunit but
you know who committed the murder right from the opening scene and the only
mystery is if the murderers will be discovered.
Wyndham Brandon (Kelly Wong) and Charles
Granillo (Travis Seetoo) share a house in Mayfair, London. They are students at
Oxford University and judging by their lodgings, their maid, their possession
of a car and overall conduct, they are very well-heeled by any standard. But they
do seem to have one small character defect. They want to commit an immaculate
murder, a killing for the fun of it and make sure no one catches them.
Michael Therriault as Rupert Cadell, Travis Seetoo as Charles Granillo
and Kelly Wong as Wyndham Brandon in Rope. Photo by Emily Cooper.
It gets worse. They invite their fellow
undergraduate to their house and murder him by strangulation with a rope at
6:45 p.m. They place the body in a chest in the middle of their parlour and have
planned a dinner party using the chest as a table. In the meantime they have invited
the victim’s father, Sir Johnstone Kentley (Peter Millard) and his aunt Mrs.
Debenham (Patty Jameson) to the dinner party together with three well-chosen
friends to enjoy the perfection of criminality, the achievement of a perfect
crime.
The friends are Kenneth Raglan (Kyle Golemba)
and Leila Arden (Alexis Gordon), decent, ordinary upper class types. There is
also Rupert Cadell (Michael Therriault) and you should pay attention to him. He
is a brilliant poet, a thinker who may share Brandon’s morality about murder but
without the stomach to achieve it.
All of the above summary comes out in the
first few minutes of the play. From then on Brandon displays his braggadocio
and his peerless achievement while the nervous Granillo drinks too much and
runs the risk of spilling the beans or perhaps the bones about the contents of
the chest on top of which the plates of food are arranged. Wong and Seetoo do
fine work as criminals with a shared morality but very different temperaments.
Jameson as Mrs. Debenham has almost nothing
to say and Golemba as Raglan and Gordon as Leila are very good as the decent
guests who make Brandon proud of his achievement and wrack Granillo’s nerves
now and then.
Brandon in
Rope. Photo by David Cooper.
Therriault as Cadell is suave, mysterious,
penetrating and the person that is truly worth fooling about the murder. Will
Brandon and Granillo succeed in committing a masterpiece of a murder? That is
the question.
Director Jani Lauzon does good work in
putting this old chestnut on the stage again. Rope respects the three unities of drama with complete
fidelity. There is a single action that takes place in chronological order with
no interruption and in one place and Lauzon keeps all the elements in perfect
order. Joanna Yu has designed a well-appointed parlour for the young men
without going overboard on the smallish stage of the Royal George Theatre.
There is an upstairs from the parlour and we see the stairs when the characters
leave the parlour.
Part of the enjoyment of Rope was seeing it
at all and it is done well making it even more attractive. And you may even
find out if one can commit a perfect crime.
And you don’t need a time machine!
___________
Rope by Patrick Hamilton will run in repertory until
October 12, 2019 at the Royal
George Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario. www.shawfest.com.
James Karas is the Senior Editor – Culture of The Greek Press.
www.greekpress.ca
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