Simon Russell Beale is the kind of actor who could read tube cancellation announcements and make commuters cry, ‘Oh! The humanity!’. So there are times when he’s almost embarrassingly good in Ira Levin’s arch 1978 comedy thriller, which twists like a rattlesnake but, despite superior acting and directing, never quite bites like one.
Classic whodunnits never die (witness ‘The Mousetrap’s endless run on the West End). And Levin, who penned ‘The Stepford Wives’ and ‘Rosemary’s Baby’, was a supremely clever genre writer with a hotline to the fears and fantasies of ’60s and ’70s Americans.
‘Deathtrap’ had a record-breaking original run on Broadway. But Levin’s hit, in which has-been writer Sidney Bruhl (Russell Beale) is tempted to kill to revive his fortunes, is too much a parody of the comedy thriller on its deathbed in the ’70s (and a tad too pleased with itself) to be a timeless classic. Having said that, if anyone is going to resuscitate it successfully it’s director Matthew Warchus, an expert at turning oldies into gold, as his hit revival of ’60s air-hostess comedy ‘Boeing Boeing’ proved when it flew from the West End to Broadway.
Warchus directs with slick, black humour and lashings of extra blood, Sturm and Drang. The cast has talent and transatlantic appeal. Jonathan Groff even has form in revamping tired genres, having made musicals cool again on telly and Broadway (he led Broadway teen-angst smash ‘Spring Awakening’ as well as ‘Glee’). He excels here as an aspiring young playwright who comes to visit Bruhl bearing the only copies of a brilliant thriller no-one else knows he has written.
Groff, Russell Beale, Clare Skinner (underused) as Bruhl’s neurotic wife, and Estelle Parsons (overplayed) as an improbably accented psychic incite plenty of laughter and a few genuine screams on a set that is bristling with weird weapons. The actors extract every ounce of comedy from the script and revel in the camp cynicism that dominates the first of the two acts ‘Nothing recedes like success,’ sighs Bruhl, reaching for a pen to note down his pun as soon as he notices how clever it was.
Russell Beale’s performance is, as ever, horribly plausible: he’s an actor who sidles up to the audience and has them nodding in sympathy with every awful feeling, from mid-life awkwardness to cowardice to bloodlust. But despite his talent for being both cuddly and homicidal, it’s odd to see a genre which has deservedly become cosy Sunday-night fodder taken so seriously.