Rivals are locked into a deadly game
(Mainly a Sleuth review – Contains spoilers)
Thanks to SMCFP member Kerri
SLEUTH’S first night was at the Theatre Royal Brighton 38 years ago. I was there. A few seats along from me was Laurence Olivier, who, apparently, had some unflattering things to say about it.
Two years later, with the thriller a huge hit, Olivier himself starred with Michael Caine in a film version. Now it’s back on stage with Simon MacCorkindale and Michael Praed in the two key roles.
Back in 1970 the play had a wit that was lacking in the detective thriller dramas of the time. Sleuth doffs its cap towards the inter-war writers of detective stories. Their stock-in-trade was the ingenious aristocratic amateur detective who solved cases when the professional Plods failed.
MacCorkindale plays Andrew Wyke, a detective novelist whose stories about his hero, St John Lord Merridew, have made him the rich owner of a manor house.
He regards himself as a master games player and he invites to house, ostensibly for a civilised chat, the younger man, Milo Tindle, who’s now his wife’s lover.
Wyke even suggests as scam in which Tindle, dressed as a clown breaks into the house, steals some jewels that he can sell, while Wyke himself is to collect the insurance money.
But in fact it’s a set-up, a terrifying humiliation game carried out at gunpoint.
You begin to realise how deeply playwright Anthony Shaffer was into conning. Milo’s conned, we’re conned, and even the programme notes are a con.
But now games are in the air. Milo is after He plays an equally vicious game, determined to show Wyke that he’s no more than a snobbish amateur.
It’s imaginatively directed by Joe Harmston and performed with pace and energy. Simon MacCorkindale even tends to suggest that Wyke is seriously unhinged as he loses control in the second act. Michael Praed is a good foil.
Ingenious as the play is, it is dependent or the audience not knowing its tricks. The fact that there’s a new film version, again with Michael Caine, doesn’t help.