For the second year in a row, Hartford Stage has opened a season with a classic murder mystery adapted by contemporary playwright. But this year it turned out to be a rather different project.
Last year’s “Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde” had a psychosocial edge, flashy special effects and a constant sense of menace which rendered the show largely humorless. “Rope,” which runs through Nov. 2, has no big effects outside of loud antique telephones and a torrential windstorm, mutes its biggest psychological moments and is generally played for laughs
“Rope” has a lot more in common with Hartford Stage’s 2022-23 season opener, “The Mousetrap” by Agatha Christie, which involved neither “Rope” playwright Jeffrey Hatcher or theater’s artistic director Melia Bensussen. Like “Rope,” “The Mousetrap” had a light touch as well as a sprawling living room setting designed by Riw Rakkulchon anchored by a huge central window and a fireplace that’s convenient for burning evidence.
In the original version written by Patrick Hamilton 96 years ago, “Rope” was an early example of the type of dark, self-aware and creepily witty dramas that were the live theater equivalent of film noir. Emlyn Williams’ “Night Must Fall” and Hamilton’s own “Gaslight” came a few years after “Rope.” Though the play is set in England, it was clearly inspired by Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb’s 1924 slaying of Bobby Franks in Chicago, a so-called “joy killing” that newspapers of the time dubbed “the crime of the century.”
The cast of “Rope” at Hartford Stage through Nov. 2. The elaborate scenic design is by Riw Rakkulchon. (T Charles Erickson)
“Rope” famously became a film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, but that movie had major differences from the play. It was set 20 years later, barely hinted at a gay relationship between the two young murderous protagonists and made the duo’s mentor and former professor a cold, youngish academic (played by Jimmy Stewart) rather that an eccentric socially conscious poet with radical political ideas.
Though there are major differences between them, both the 1929 play (based on reviews and interviews from the time) and the 1949 movie treated the material as suspenseful and menacing and horrific. When Hamilton first wrote it, he told an interviewer “I have gone all the way to write a horror play and make your flesh creep.”
The setting is a cocktail party held by two young men, named Brandon and Lewis in Hatcher’s version, who are intending to take a long car trip together later that night once the guests have left. Only Brandon, Lewis and the audience know that the large trunk which is serving as a coffee table for the drinks and snacks at the party is stuffed with the corpse of an acquaintance of theirs whom they murdered earlier that day. That is not a spoiler, we learn all this in the first few minutes of the show. “Rope” then plays out like an episode of “Columbo.” We know whodunnit. The drama comes from waiting for others to find out. The character whose reactions throughout the play are most important is a poet/philosopher named Rupert Cadell, a self-described “peg-legged misanthrope” who, as a university lecturer, had impressed Brandon with his views on Friedrich Nietzche’s concept of “man and superman.”
Mark Benninghofen plays Rupert as an aging eccentric who is sometimes hard to take seriously. Daniel Neale as Brandon ratchets up the character’s air of smug superiority, while Ephraim Birney as Lewis complements his partner-in-crime’s hoity-toity attitude with a jittery obsequiousness.
Fiona Robberson and Ephraim Birney in the classic murder mystery “Rope.” The Patrick Hamilton play, now adapted for Hartford Stage by Jeffrey Hatcher, was famously the basis of a 1948 Alfred Hitchcock movie. (T Charles Erickson)
None of the actors in “Rope” have been in a Hartford Stage show before with one exception. Fiona Robberson played Ann, the love interest of the sons in “All My Sons” for Bensussen last year. In “Rope,” she plays Meriel, who is in a tentative relationship with Ronald, the murder victim.
Hatcher has streamlined Hamilton’s plot in some ways and complicated it in others. He’s reduced its three-act structure to a more serviceable, and potentially more suspenseful, intermissionless 90 minutes. He’s added some details to the mystery that make the ending more about a slew of clues than the psychological aspects of the crime. It’s a question of emphasis and tone.
Just as he did with his popular recent adaptation of Frederick Knott’s 1952 murder mystery “Dial M for Murder” (which had a Connecticut production at Westport Country Playhouse in 2023), Hatcher makes clear references to same-sex relationships, something that playwrights he is adapting could only hint at. There is no effort made to adjust the violence or psychological analysis in the play to more liberal modern levels. There is a concerted effort to not let things get too heavy.
What has been carefully adjusted is the humor of the piece. There’s a consistent flow of amusing cocktail chatter, insults, comical gasps of surprise and even some physical shtick.
New version of classic murder mystery making its world premiere at Hartford Stage
Early on, the audience is primed to laugh by Hatcher’s and Hamilton’s pithy one-liners and by Bensussen’s breezy direction, and they continue to chuckle throughout the play even when it gets harsher or more complex. Things calm down a lot for the wordy denouement in which some of Cadell’s teachings come back to haunt him, but even that part is undercut by the production’s desire to keep things light.
This “Rope” doesn’t quite unravel, but you can’t call it taut. There’s still the air of what one character calls “macabre piquancy” in the basic situation of holding a party to celebrate an undisclosed murder. Yet other potential interpretations loudly proclaim themselves. There are opportunities for deeper, darker, layered readings here. For better or worse, this production has stood against realism and chosen an openly theatrical, melodramatic, entertaining-at-all-costs approach. Hamilton gave Hatcher and Hartford Stage enough “Rope,” and this is what they did with it.
“Rope” by Patrick Hamilton, adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher and directed by Melia Bensussen, runs through Nov. 2 at Hartford Stage, 50 Church St., Hartford. Performances are Tuesdays through Saturdays at 7:30 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. with added 2 p.m. matinees on Oct. 25, 29 and Nov. 1. $20-$105. hartfordstage.org.
