Rope
By Albert Williams
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
First produced in 1929, Rope marked the playwriting debut of English novelist Patrick Hamilton. In The Light That Failed, Hamilton’s biographer and brother Bruce Hamilton notes that the play was inspired by the 1924 Leopold-Loeb case (though Bailiwick Repertory’s publicity asserts that it was based on a British murder); certainly the central characters recall the University of Chicago students whose “thrill killing” of a Hyde Park neighbor boy shocked the nation (and inspired the films Compulsion and Swoon). In Rope, best known these days in its Americanized Alfred Hitchcock movie version, Oxford University classmates Wyndham Brandon and Charles Granillo lure a 20-year-old chum, Ronald Kentley, to their London townhouse one night. There they strangle him, lock his body in a huge trunk, then host a party using the trunk as a buffet table; for an extra sadistic frisson, the party’s guest of honor is the victim’s father.
The murderers’ motive is to revel in pure “adventure and danger”–and to prove that, by committing the perfect crime, they are superior beings, invulnerable to detection and unfettered by quaint notions of morality. Their perversity has been unwittingly nurtured by their mentor, a brilliant but bitter poet named Rupert Cadell, whom they also invite to the dinner party. Lame from a wound suffered during World War I, the waspish Rupert embodies the disillusion of a generation whose young men were slaughtered in “the war to end all wars” (his name recalls Rupert Brooke, the beloved soldier-poet whose death came to symbolize the war’s waste). Rupert preaches that murder is merely a matter of degree in a society that calls the killing of one person criminal but the killing of thousands heroic; Brandon’s secret is that he’s put into practice what Rupert dares only to preach.
Deathwatch, like Rope, was its author’s first play, an imperfect transition from the printed page to the living stage. (Even so, this play and its successor, The Maids, won Genet the 1947 Prix de la Pleiades, selected by a jury that included Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Andre Malraux; whether by design or coincidence, Trap Door’s production marks the 50th anniversary of its first public reading, in January 1947.) Genet himself came to recognize its problems, going so far as to write in 1967 that he never wanted the play produced again. Luckily, he didn’t get his wish.
The production’s only false note comes even before the play begins–in an embarrassingly hokey bit, audience members are bullied by club-wielding “guards” as they enter the auditorium. This trivializes the authenticity of Genet’s experience and compromises the considerable force exerted by the rest of the show.
