Rope
By Patrick Hamilton. Directed by Robert Walsh. Set design by Charlie Morgan. Lighting by L. Stacy Eddy. Costumes by Gail Astrid Buckley. With William Church, Gerardo Rodriguez, Nathaniel McIntyre, Kathleen Monteleone, Gideon Banner, Rachel Neuman, James Bodge, Susan Hern, and Derek Stone Nelson. At the Stoneham Theatre, Thursday through Sunday through November 4.

Patrick Hamilton’s 1929 play Rope is remembered today only because it served as the basis for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 film of the same name. The evidence on display at the Stoneham Theatre, where the play is getting a rare revival, suggests that its obscurity is not undeserved.

Like the film, the play takes place in a living room within a two-hour period. Two male undergraduates, whom we’re meant to see as brilliant and amoral, kill a classmate in a gratuitous exercise of their own superiority. For more thrills, they then host a dinner party in the presence of the corpse (stashed in a chest). But one of the guests, a poet named Rupert, suspects the truth. After the party breaks up, Rupert returns to confront the killers, open the chest, and ensure retribution.

Arthur Laurents’s screenplay for the Hitchcock film is so much better than Hamilton’s script that going back to the play is pointless. If you want to stage Rope, why not stage Laurents’s version? The Hamilton play is set in 1920s London, and at Stoneham that means suffering through the vicissitudes of adopted accents, the phoniness that seeps into a production when actors have to think about their accents at all, and buckets of that grim frivolity that usually gets slapped all over anything to do with the era, especially when it’s a murder story.

Apart from setting the play more accessibly in post–World War II Manhattan, Laurents tightened the plot. The original is cluttered with a lot of nonsense about the victim’s theater ticket; the film gets rid of that. In the play, Rupert’s connection to the killers is vague; in the film (where he’s portrayed by Jimmy Stewart), he’s the philosophy professor from whom they imbibed the vulgar Nietzscheanism by which they justify their crime. And whereas Rupert’s statement of his decadent pro-murder philosophy confuses by coming late in the play, after he’s already wised up to the probability that a real murder has taken place, in the film he makes it before his suspicions are aroused. These changes throw the film’s focus onto Rupert’s mounting horror and guilt, making him a much more involved and involving character than the play’s Rupert, who merely has to go from blasé to indignant.

The play and the film are equally inexplicit about the presumed homosexuality of the two killers. Passing on the opportunity to clarify the matter, the Stoneham production, directed by Robert Walsh, has the pair enjoy two quick embraces. If they’re meant to be lovers, these clinches are awfully settled and perfunctory. The production fails to play up still another angle: the topicality Rope has acquired now that irony has been pronounced dead (on the front page of this newspaper, among other places) after September 11. The chilling fundamentalism of that pronouncement finds a deep affirmation in Rupert’s belated moral severity and his gleeful prediction that the killers are going to hang. A weakness of both the play and the film is the ironist-murderers’ failure to make a compelling case for their side. But if they are really meant to be Leopold and Loeb, Chicago’s famous " thrill killers " of the 1920s, Hamilton could have counted on his audience’s noticing that Rupert was wrong: thanks to defense attorney Clarence Darrow’s marathon plea against capital punishment, the Chicago pair got life in prison.

The play is filled with obnoxious small talk that regularly grinds to a halt in order to highlight yet another awkward pause in the conversation or to allow the hosts to refill glasses. For all this to work, the actors would all have to be supremely stylish and British to the tips of their cigarettes. Derek Stone Nelson’s somber, sardonic Rupert frequently hits the mark, and Rachel Neuman is also good as a bubbly guest. As the dominant member of the pair of killers, William Church is too stolid and affected. He and Nelson, however, take off in the final showdown, which is staged as crisply as could be wished. This ending is very effective, but getting to it is murder.

Issue Date: October 25-31, 2001