The Stage

Deathtrap

Published Wednesday 8 September 2010 at 12:12 by Mark Shenton

Thrillers, once a staple of the stage repertoire, have long been in the theatrical morgue - notwithstanding the fact that the world’s longest ever running play The Mousetrap is one. The current production at the St Martin’s is not so much a living specimen but may actually have been cryogenically frozen, awaiting resuscitation should a new way to bring it back to life reveals itself.

Maybe they just need to send director Matthew Warchus in. Having previously worked his magic in reviving a sixties sex farce, another apparently dead genre, into the transatlantic hit Boeing-Boeing, he now brings his astonishing fresh eye and constantly-surprising instincts and inventiveness to that big seventies hit - Deathtrap. He is invaluably joined by his regular creative team that includes Rob Howell, Hugh Vanstone and Gary Yershon respectively providing the imposing set, scary lighting and atmospheric music.

This thriller about the writing of thrillers themselves is not just full of thrills but also performed the ultimate hatchet job - it wrote thrillers themselves out of existence, as it offered audiences a masterclass in how they are put together, and with all of the tricks of the trade now revealed, there was hardly any need for any more to be written again.

Author Ira Levin wittily puts every bitter pill that a playwright has had to swallow on the table, as he has a writer of once-celebrated stage thrillers Sidney Bruhl, who has discovered, in his words, that “nothing recedes like success”, now reduced to teaching seminars on writing them instead of seeing his own successfully brought to the stage. It is at one such seminar that he meets a younger fan Clifford Anderson, who turns into his protege.

To reveal more would be to breach one of the cardinal rules of reviewing plays like this - the joy of them is in the constant layering of tension and surprises. Suffice it to say that Warchus and his wonderful pair of leads, with the quietly resentful and carefully scheming Simon Russell Beale as the senior playwright, and Jonathan Groff as the opportunistic young man who clearly has an agenda of his own, bring a riveting and insinuating intelligence to it.

Claire Skinner and Estelle Parsons are less successful in the underwritten roles of the playwright’s wife and a comic-relief psychic neighbour respectively, able only to play one note of strained anxiety each.

But this is a production that keeps the audience in a constant state of anxiety, too. The only people with nothing to worry about are producers David Pugh and Dafydd Rogers, who have another solid West End hit on their hands and a sure-fire Broadway transfer ahead. Sidney Bruhl will no doubt wish he could kill them. Perhaps that’s a sequel that’s waiting to be written.

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