Deathtrap

The actors, having taken their bows after a rip-roaring opening night of Deathtrap, told the audience to keep the plot under their hats as they go off into the night. And with good reason; stage thrillers rely almost solely on the suspense of each plot twist, and to know them before you step into the typically freezing Drama Barn would somewhat defeat the point of the evening, even if Ira Levin’s play has been a major Broadway hit ever since it began in 1978.

With that in mind, I will give this much away; Sidney Bruhl, a haughty playwright in the twilight of his career, senses there hope yet when a young, naïve student of his university course writes a script to a play so good, it is worth killing for in order to publish it under his own name, resurrect a flagging reputation and pocket the financial rewards to keep his trophy wife happy. Yet things quickly turn out not as they initially seem, in a play that is almost too forthcoming in plot divergences.

Director Rory McGregor and producer Helen Peatfield changed the original setting from Connecticut to rural southern England with great aplomb. The set was fantastic, a shabby living room-cum-office which yearned for splendour but exuded modesty. On its back wall was a vast array of lethal weapons, from axes and maces to guns and handcuffs. It became abundantly clear that these were not just there as part of the set, but more as a giant props table…

Bruhl, a writer famed for one play, ridiculed for multiple others, is played with comic genius by Mungo Tatton-Brown, whose timing and mastery of the stuffy, rude, quintessentially English snob was impeccable. The character even has a penchant for the term “plebeian”, an inadvertently topical insult at present.

Caught in a loveless marriage with trophy wife Myra (played by Lily Cooper), Bruhl reads the manuscript for Deathtrap and is determined to carry out his plan by luring its confident and boyish author Clifford Anderson (Louis Lunts) to his home, all for one last stab at success. The interaction in culture and outlook between the married couple and their social antithesis in Anderson was played out expertly, as was the dawning realisation by the hysterical Myra realises her deranged husband was not joking about his crazy plan.

If the first few scenes aren’t surreal enough, we meet neighbour Helga Ten Dorp, a bizarre Dutch clairvoyant, who through broken English, predicts the play’s goings on with terrific accuracy. Rosie Brear plays the role brilliantly as the most bewildering, bumbling and hilarious harbinger of doom. We also meet Porter Milgrim (played by Richard Spears), Bruhl’s dull yet razor sharp lawyer, who is less of a drip that first anticipated.

The play has laughs in all the right places, and is jam packed with quite frankly brilliant one-liners as well as slapstick and deliberately placed thunder and lightning that even had Tatton-Brown struggling to keep a straight face at one point. Yet right through the evening, it is impossible to lose sight of just how sinister and unnerving Deathtrap is. You try and predict where the plot will turn next in this play-within-a-play and the likelihood is you will fail. You find yourself yearning for a sip of the brandy liberally consumed by the characters to calm you down.

However, a pitfall of the play is an overwhelming sense of pride in its own uniqueness. The fourth wall is broken numerous times, with nods to the audience, critics and directors. The feeling, however, is that it is overdone, to the extent that you wish Levin had been a bit less self-aware and occupied himself more with the actual plot.

Yet this production was extremely well-judged in its balance of laughs and thrills. McGregor has clearly produced a piece to entertain, with no shortage of laughter and startled shock. And if we use the audience’s reaction on a packed out first night as an indicator, he’s hit the nail squarely on the head.