Killers: Rope and Punch

Ephraim Birney and Daniel Neale in Rope. (Photo: Hartford Stage.)

The English playwright Patrick Hamilton – best known for Angel Street, the thriller that became the classic 1945 film Gaslight – wrote Rope in 1929, five years after the celebrated Chicago murder case that inspired it. Two well-heeled University of Chicago students, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, who were lovers, kidnapped and murdered Loeb’s fourteen-year-old cousin Bobby Franks to prove that they could commit the perfect crime – and that, as superior intellectual specimens, they had the right to operate outside the realm of accepted morality. (The irony was how badly these self-proclaimed Nietzschean Übermenschen bungled it.) The case, which their lawyer, Clarence Darrow, used as his most famous argument against capital punishment – he succeeded in getting his clients life sentences rather than the gallows they seemed fated for – has never entirely disappeared from popular culture: it has generated plays, films, a musical and one famous novelization, Meyer Levin’s Compulsion. In a 2018 review in this publication of the book The Leopold and Loeb Files: An Intimate Look at One of America’s Most Infamous Crimes, Devin McKinney conveys with poetic eloquence the enduring power of this murder, which has moved so many interpreters to theorize on the motivation of the killers but has remained an unsolvable mystery.

Movie buffs familiar with the story know it from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 film of Hamilton’s play. It’s a dull movie that is now more famous for the director’s weirdly clumsy attempt to make it feel like a stage play by relying on long takes (every time he runs out of film stock he zooms into the back of an actor’s jacket and back out again), and for screenwriter Arthur Laurents’s handling of the homosexual material without upsetting the Production Code office. Rope is one of those pictures from the big studio era that historians have held up as examples of queer coding: one of the young actors, John Dall, was gay and the other, Farley Granger, was bisexual and kept house with Laurents. But I think you’d have to be pretty naïve even in the closeted late forties to miss the sexual implications of the two killers’ bond. However, Hamilton’s play, which relocates the story to London’s Mayfair neighborhood (Laurents and Hitchcock re-Americanized it, setting it in Manhattan), is a compelling and satisfying murder melodrama, and since it was rediscovered in an acclaimed revival at London’s Almeida Theatre about a decade and a half ago, it has been seen fairly widely.

The current, beautifully staged (by the company’s artistic director, Melia Bensussen) and elegantly produced version at Hartford Stage is a newly commissioned adaptation of the original by the clever playwright Jeffrey Hatcher, who has pared it down to a ninety-minute one-act. Hatcher, of course, has imposed his own ideas about what might have caused the killers, here called Brandon and Lewis, to enact their heinous scheme. In his rewrite, the Nietzschean stuff turns out to mask personal hostilities, and he has had to execute some fancy footwork to insert his last-minute twists. They’re more entertaining than persuasive, but the play moves so fast that we don’t have time to reject them – at least, not until the drive home. Anyway, they’re no less plausible than Laurents’s or Richard Murphy’s in the screenplay of the bogus 1959 movie of Compulsion. (Each of these films contains one redeeming element: the Hitchcock Rope has Farley Granger and Compulsion has the remarkable Dean Stockwell, both playing versions of the same character, the one inspired by Leopold.)

At Hartford Stage, Daniel Neale has the showier role, Brandon, though Hatcher has modified the relationship of the two young men so that it doesn’t break down quite so easily into that of the sociopathic leader and the neurotic follower. Brandon is narcissistic and wears his moneyed upbringing on his sleeve. It’s he who comes up with the macabre idea to host a dinner party in their flat, which Lewis inherited from his uncle, half an hour after they have killed their victim, Ron Kentley, a gifted athlete they’ve known since boarding school, and serve the food on the chest in which they have stored the body. Their guests include Ron’s father, Mr. Kentley, his fiancée, Meriel, his best friend, Kenneth (also a boarding school acquaintance), and Rupert Cadell, who was their favorite teacher and housemaster. It’s tricky to play Brandon without turning him into a caricature of aristocratic entitlement, and Neale falls straight into the trap. It doesn’t help that he makes the same physical and vocal choices in every scene. John Dall isn’t convincing in the movie either, though at least Hitchcock and Laurents gave him a stutter as a psychological tell. Ephraim Birney is much more grounded and subtle as Lewis, and Mark Benninghofen is impressive as the most interesting character, Cadell, who introduced them to Nietzsche when they were teenagers and who figures out what they’ve been up to. Brandon makes the mistake of believing that Cadell shares their conviction that ordinary morality doesn’t apply to them. It falls to Cadell to deliver the moral lesson. In the film, where a badly miscast Jimmy Stewart plays him, Cadell has to reveal the basic fellow feeling beneath his cynicism and ironic tone. Hamilton gave him a war wound that Laurents eliminated; Hatcher makes the link between his experience in the Great War and his moral substance explicit. Hamilton describes him as affected, and Benninghofen plays him as a dashed romantic figure. Rupert is a one-time Bloomsbury poet who now writes murder mysteries – we’re meant to see that, unlike his old pupils, he perceives the difference between the real world and gamesmanship. The costume designer, Risa Ando, has included a purple ascot and a golden cummerbund among his dinner-party attire and the performance exposes the complexities of the man who would choose such embellishments.

The trio of supporting players – James Riordan as Mr. Kentley, Fiona Robberson as Meriel and Nick Saxton as Kenneth – is strong. Riordan, whose anxiety over his son’s absence at the party grows in the course of the evening, brings the note of gravitas the play needs to give it some emotional depth. (An added touch: his mustache and the gray tint of his make-up lend him a slightly cadaverous look.) Robberson’s Meriel is a flapper with style and breeding who is touchingly unsure of herself and of her relationship with the man she’s engaged to marry. (Here too Ando’s distinctive design underscores the character.) Saxton makes careful choices that pay off in the final moments of the play. The setting, provided by Riw Rakkulchon, is a gorgeous, airy double-tiered drawing room with a glimpse of a library off right and a large upstage picture window that offers delicate, suggestive reflections of the actors. A scenic designer who gets to work on Hartford Stage’s generous boards is lucky, and the visual elements of the company’s shows are a continual pleasure. That compliment extends here to Mary Louise Geiger’s evocative lighting.

Will Harrison and the company of Punch. (Photo: Matthew Murphy.)

James Graham’s Punch, a Manhattan Theater Club transplant from the Nottingham Playhouse via London’s West End, dramatizes the true story of an eighteen-year-old, Jacob Dunne, who, unprovoked but revved up on alcohol and cocaine and testosterone, killed another young man, a complete stranger, in a Nottingham pub, with a single punch and rehabilitated himself after getting out of prison with the help of his victim’s parents. Graham is a prolific and successful English playwright with talent, but my usual response to his work – which includes Ink and Dear England – is that the first act is colorful and entertaining and the second act takes itself way too seriously. In the case of Punch, which is based on Dunne’s memoir, Right from Wrong, act one is trite but in act two the unusual and undeniably affecting quality of the narrative transcends the banality of the writing. I didn’t care much for Adam Penford’s kinetic staging (Leanne Pinder is the movement director) and Will Harrison’s portrayal of Jacob, energetic as it is, doesn’t contain many layers. But Victoria Clark and Sam Robards are superb as the grieving parents who reach out to their twenty-eight-year-old son’s killer as a way of finding meaning in his senseless death.

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.