SLEUTH.
London
SLEUTH
by Anthony Shaffer
Apollo Theatre
Mon-Sat 8pm Mats Thur 3pm & Sat 4pm
Runs 2hr 10min One interval
TICKETS 020 7494 5070
Review Timothy Ramsden 15 July 2002
The dark side of a genre that wouldn't grow up, emerges in a revival of Shaffer's once-famed thriller.Sleuth tensed audience muscles in new directions back in 1970; along with the laughter of Stoppard's near-contemporary Real Inspector Hound it finished off – stabbed in the back – the remnants of the self-serious stage 'tec puzzle-play. Now it's back and in Elijah Moshinsky's hands, it means business.
Moshinsky plays down the crime elements. No flashing police lights, no grimly guffawing prop-clown; the latter, a full-size toy, sits rather under-used in a corner. Several small modernisations mean little – though the Euro reference neatly updates Wike's xenophobia. Paul Farnsworth's blanked-out baronial hall suggests the production wants to do away with the country-house setting Shaffer took with a pinch of irony from old stage mysteries.
For established crime-writer Andrew Wyke's errant wife can't abide such places (she's lived with him in one). In 1970 there were still a few Wykes around. An old, xenophobic generation of no longer so important writers adrift on a sea of royalties from their ageing readerships, harking back to the 1930s when the fictional fashion was for simplified, stratified society – no sex, clean violence – living out their narrow success in that fashion.
So Milo is everything Andrew hates – young, foreign, dirtying his hands in business. And his wife's lover. But Moshinsky's focus is human responsibility: as Milo says, most people want someone to live with, not to play with. Gray O' Brien is vocally inflexible on occasion, but just makes believable that his mature approach to life could combine with his revenge games.
As for Bowles, wearing black throughout – apart from a few moments when he dons a tiny, bright apron to struggle with a tin of baked beans (another inconvenience of his wife's departure) – contempt slides under the polite veneer from the start. Only when Milo matches his cunning does Wike open out, revealing there's nothing beneath the loathing and disgust. For a few minutes, as Milo takes possession, judge-like, of his balcony, Wike flounders, but it's not long before self-delusion, and self-importance, return.
Bowles plays down any suggestion of urgency or panic when he's set to find three objects before the police arrive. It lowers the tension, but that's a side-effect of crime on stage trying to grow up.
Andrew Wike: Peter Bowles
Milo Tindle: Gray O' Brien
Cast changes 2 December 2002-8 February 2003
Andrew Wike: Ian Ogilvy
Milo Tindle: Jonathan Kerrigan
Director: Elijah Moshinsky
Designer: Paul Farnsworth
Lighting: Nick Richings
Sound: Simon Whitehorn
Fight arranger: William Hobbs
Dialect coach: Penny Dyer
2002-07-16 10:19:56