Review – Rope

If you haven’t yet tried it yourself this exam season, see what happens when students murder each other. It’s Rope, Dramasoc’s last production of the year.


Rope opens with murder. Two students in 1920s London are, symbolically and with shaking hands, closing the lid of a chest. Inside the chest is the freshly strangled body of a fellow undergraduate. The rest of the play follows the party they throw that night, guests drinking and joking just metres away from the corpse as the hosts sweat.

  The chest sits centre stage, the audience in a horseshoe around it. There’s a wireless, a liquor table, and slick-haired, suited students. With all this talk of murder, it’s pretty easy to forget you’re in Union House 1.28, just above the LCR where equal horrors have surely occurred.

Rope starts off incredibly tense and never really lets the audience disengage. The first scene is quiet, with the new murderers reeling. Ardi Mejzini plays Brandon: suave, clever and very much in control of the situation. Once their silence starts to break up, we begin to see Brandon’s relish in ‘murder without motive.’ Granillo feels a little differently, while Jonathan Cobb’s character is frenetic, overwhelmed by conscience. As the play progresses, he gets drunker and increasingly manic.

The dynamic between the two is crucial and completely convincing. Brandon is very straight-backed and might be charming if you didn’t know about the dead guy in the box, but he’s severe with Granillo. In their quarrels the latter always crumples.

The pair’s guests are, as is the tendency in theatre/student parties, a mixed bunch. Their arrival is a massive relief, allowing laughter to perforate the immense tension. Lucy Mangan and Jake Head are chiefly responsible for this, portraying innocent guests, flirtatious, frivolous and pleasantly vapid. Ollie Partington’s character, on the other hand, is wary and challenges Brandon and Granillo to the play’s shocking conclusion. Partingdon’s character Rupert Cadell is intelligent, incisive, and quite frankly a bit like Hugh Laurie’s House. He even has a cane.

Things get pretty macabre as the deceased’s father and aunt arrive, her distant manner is hilarious, if a little reminiscent of a dazed Wallace and Gromit character. The guests eat tiny, adorable triangle sandwiches off of the chest with the dead guy in it. Cadell’s presence becomes more sinister. Granillo gets very, very drunk.

Truly, 1.28 provides the perfect staging for Rope. It’s incredibly intimate, characters sitting in the front row amongst the audience, and the space is handled impeccably, not feeling overly claustrophobic. Sound and lighting choices are simple but faultless.

  In terms of performances overall, Rope offers one of the most consistent casts of UEA’s theatrical year, all actors demonstrating honed RP accents and, integrally, an excellent sense of proportion within such close quarters. Particular mention has to go to Cobb and Mejzini, the play’s leads, whose emotionally wrought scenes could have easily been maltreated, turned to unconvincing mush in the hands of less talented, balanced actors.

Rope is a genuinely fantastic production and a true showcase of UEA’s theatrical professionalism. It will be performed tonight and tomorrow, so get your tickets fast as there are only 50 seats a show!

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