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DEATH TRAP by Ira Levin
Venue: Richmond 1981
Directed by Kim Grant



Cast
Sidney Bruhl
Gordon Jackson
Clifford Anderson
Andrew Bicknell
Myra Bruhl
Jane Lowe
Helga Ten Dorp
Mary Kenton
Porter Milgrim
Peter Birrel

Review

When Deathtrap opened at the Garrick a year or two ago, the play received unfavourable comparisons with Sleuth, hitherto the most ingenious plot for a thriller ever conceived. Unfavourable and unfair, as may be indicated by the length of its run, the success of the current tour, and the fact that no less a director than Richard Donner is turning it into a movie. Deathrap is as original as anyone could wish for, with more twists in its tail than the three little pigs and some very smart dialogue by Ira Levin, who creates two intriguing characters in his middle-aged playwright Sidney Bruhl, and his young acolyte Clifford Anderson who appears eager to gratify his slightest whim. The ambivalance in their relationship may seem to contain echoes of the Schaffer play, yet it is very different. The plot hinges on the interplay between the personalities, and to say more might divulge too much.

Kim Grant directs and wrings the utmost out of every situation and he is extraordinarily well-served by his leading players. Gordon Jackson steps light years away form his familiar television persona to give a subtle and entirely convincing portrayal of a man whose gayness is shadowed by sombre undertones indeed. Young Andrew Bicknell, playing opposite him, is by turns appealing, attractive and despicable; a performance of considerable complexity that it would be difficult to imagine bettered. Jane Lowe plays the wife on a note of mounting hysteria, while Mary Kenton provides the welcome extra note of comedy with her fractured vowels as Helga Ten Dorp, a nosey psychic. Humour, in fact, much of it jet-black by implication, leavens the melodrama and helps oil the wheels of each new plot revolution. Then, just when we think we’ve seen it all, Levin brings off an outrageously entertaining coup-de theatre with the female seer and Bruhl’s attorney correctly underplayed by Peter Birrel.