Pitlochry Festival Theatre, 6 June 2012, and in rep. until September

SAY what you like about Patrick Hamilton’s 1929 thriller, but there can’t be many West End hits that pivot on a working knowledge of Friedrich Nietzsche.

THE real-time setting of Rope is in the kind of well-to-do drawing room favoured by Noel Coward and other bourgeois playwrights of the day. Yet rather than give us an entirely frivolous pot-boiler, the playwright uses the scenario of an undergraduate party as an opportunity to expose the weaknesses of Nietzschean philosophy.

Pitlochry Theatre's Rope - Charlie Tighe (photo Douglas McBride)

In Richard Baron’s unshowy production, Elliot Harper and Charlie Tighe play two Oxford students, Brandon and Granillo, who, from the moment the play starts in the half-light of a stormy night, make us understand they have committed a terrible crime. In the chest in front of them is the body of a fellow student, an athletic 20-year-old called Ronald, whom they have killed for no better reason than they felt like it.

Or at least, we are led to believe there is no better reason. By the end of the play, it becomes clear they are under the influence of Nietzsche’s ideas about the übermensch  or superman. Like the American students Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb who attempted to commit the perfect murder in 1924, a few years before Hamilton wrote the play, Brandon and Granillo have convinced themselves of their own superiority to such an extent they’re prepared to kill someone without remorse.

Not only that, but they’ll throw a party for friends and relatives of their victim, serving food and drink off the improvised coffin.

The plot teases us with the question of whether or not they’ll get away with it (of course they won’t), but the play is not over until Hamilton has exposed the flaw in their misguided philosophy, a philosophy that was about to be championed, let’s not forget, by the emerging Nazi party. He does this through the figure of Rupert Cadell, played here by Dan Smith, a poet who has been left jaded by his experiences fighting in the First World War. Despite his cynicism, however, Cadell realises he still has more humanity than Brandon and Granillo.

He discovers their crime through his powers of detection. His victory, however, is not so much that of the sleuth but of a man with a greater grasp of morality.

In 2012, when we are concerned neither with the chit-chat of upper-class drawing rooms nor with the finer points of Nietzschean philosophy, the subtleties of this argument can seem a little distant. There is some mileage, however, in the will-they-won’t-they plot, which still keeps us guessing, and the sense of a play engaging, however clunkily, in some bigger than average ideas.

© Francis McLachlan, 2012

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• Pitlochry Festival Theatre