Cherwell’s verdict: “Criminally good”
ROPE is not a murder mystery. Far more disturbingly, it is the explicit depiction of a cold-blooded, motiveless murder, conducted for no other reason than to achieve the “perfect crime”, drawn from the notorious Loeb and Leopold case of 1923. Brandon, one of the two murderers, chillingly and proudly describes it as a “passionless, motiveless, faultless and clueless murder.”
Director Susanna Quirke has drawn inspiration for her play from the original play by Patrick Hamilton, on which Hitchcock based his 1948 film. Hitchcock set his version in New York, but Quirke keeps the Oxford setting, adding an unsettling edge to the parallel between the characters and actors.
ROPE portrays two intelligent and aristocratic Oxford students, Brandon and Granillo (Joe Prospero and Jonathan Purkiss). They strangle fellow student Ronald Kentley with a rope to prove that their superior intellect enables them to commit murder without being caught, and to satisfy their disgust for Ronald’s inferiority. What is most disquieting is that the two students serve dinner on top of the very trunk their freshly killed corpse lies in; the crowning touch that gives the whole murder its “piquancy,” as Brandon gloats. Yet, one of their guests, Rupert Cadell, a poet who they consider their intellectual equal, acted by Jared Fortune, begins to unravel their secret, revealing that there is no such thing as the perfect crime.
The actors maintain an agonisingly tense atmosphere throughout as innuendos are dropped here and there by Brandon, and the guests playfully accuse the murderous pair of concealing rotting bones in their bizarre chest. Prospero delivers a well-mastered frightening fluctuation between terse and unnatural self-control to hysterical paranoia, and Purkiss’s calm arrogance seems unsettlingly natural. The most promising character was perhaps Rupert Cadell; Jared Fortune completely immerses himself in the role as if it were his second skin. The butler Sabot, played by Luke Rollason, even infuses this shadowy play with some unexpected humour every now and then.
Admittedly there was the odd slip-up, but this first act preview already assures an absorbingly sinister performance.
