Review: Rope

Everybody loves a good detective story, but the joy of Rope is the clever way the formula is twisted round. Far from trying to figure out 'whodunit', writer Ptrick Hamilton presents the audience with the murderers at the start of the show. This is not a murder mystery but a murder certainty. It's the resulting dramatic irony that keeps us hooked, as we wonder if the reprehensible murderers will indeed get away with the perfect crime.

Kieran Walsh is brilliant as Wyndham Brandon, the ultimate vanity murder. Confident, self assured and more than a touch precious, he controls his living room as if it were a stage, and his assembled dinner guests as if they were his own cast of characters, seating them around the chest in which the body resides with macabre glee. His accomplice Charles Granillo, played with nervous and self-destructive anxiety by James Sheppard, offers a perfect mirror image of the alternative human responses: fear, dread and guilt.

There is a fine ensemble cast featuring an avuncular Guy Peskin as Sir Johnstone Kentley and a perpetually silent Sarah Howell as Mrs Debenham. Adee Woods is touchingly goofy as upperclass oddball Kenneth Raglan and Dale Carpenter is impressive as the sarcastic intellectual Rupert Cadell who becomes the play's de facto inspector. But the stand out performance for me was Danielle Gordon who brought more than a dash of dazzling panache and theatricality to the role of Leila Arden. Not only does she open the show with a terrific bit of Charleston dancing in a fabulous 20s hoofer style, but she bring such confident stage presence and assured comic timing that she frequently provides the much needed comedy relief to the grisly main action.

The set design by Robert Glass is marvellous, creating enough of a sense of naturalism and period detail to make the narrative convincing. Equally excellent is the lighting design by Eddie Stephens. The shifting yellows and reds of the fireside create a hellish atmosphere at the start, while the striking blues and whites of the storm build chilling tension.

The play itself is rather ponderous at times, with lots of weighty monologues, but as we move into the winter this deathly tale proves a paradoxically cosy entertainment.