Rope at the Almeida

Is human life valuable? Does it matter if you wipe one little blighter off the face of the earth when the Great War has already taken away millions? ‘No’, is the answer, according to Wyndham Brandon and Charles Granillo, the two Oxford undergraduates who murder a fellow student at the start of Patrick Hamilton’s Rope.

Written in 1929 and subsequently made into a film by Alfred Hitchcock, Rope is based on the case of Leopold and Loeb, two highly intelligent University of Chicago graduates who murdered a 14-year-old in 1924. They were driven by a desire to commit the perfect crime, as well as the idea that they were Nietzschean ‘supermen’ – individuals for whom consequences don’t apply.

The action in Roger Michell’s (director of the film Notting Hill) stage version is set around a large chest inside which lies the murdered body of Ronald Kentley. The remorseless Brandon (Blake Ritson) and whimpering Granillo (Alex Waldmann) are so invested in murder as intellectual bravado that they invite a small party to drink and eat off the chest and its gory contents. The guest list includes Ronald’s vulnerable father, Sir Johnstone Kentley (Michael Elwyn) and Rupert Cadell (Bertie Carvel), a poet and World War I veteran who sees through the jolly good show with piercing clarity.

What plays out in this interval-less two hours is a game of cat and mouse intercut with amusing parlour scenes that bring to life the frothy entertainment available to the privileged of the  ‘20s.

The script is tight and keeps events racing through the slow-burning hysteria of Granillo, the  indefatigable composure of Brandon and the ever urbane Rupert’s observations. Everyone in this philosophical, period thriller plays their part with conviction but it is the latter that whacks it out of the park. It is a miracle that his tremulous voice – which takes camp through a whole new harmonic range, his strained movements – courtesy of a war injury – and his flamboyant mannerisms come together to form a plausible character but somehow Bertie Carvel’s Rupert is the perfect conduit for the action and, ultimately,  provides the beating heart of the piece.

Because eventually, despite the coldness of the premise, Rope does have a conscience and with a spine-chilling speech delivered by Carvel at his peak, the answer to the question of whether every life has value is a heartfelt ‘yes’.

Rope runs until Saturday 6 February at:

Almeida Theatre
Almeida Street
Islington
N1 1TA

Box office: 020 7359 4404