Rope

The setting: an apartment in Mayfair, London, in the 1920s. The story: two students, Wyndham Brandon and Charles Granillo, murder fellow student Ronald Kentley and for their pièce de résistance, invite carefully chosen guests round for an awkward soirée.

This incredibly well crafted performance manipulates the audience in a variety of ways. Starting in complete darkness, the hard, calm voice of Solomon Mousley’s Brandon rings out across the theatre, telling the audience how he and his nervous accomplice have committed an "immaculate murder". A deep red glow from the fireplace illuminates their silhouettes and the forbidding chest in the centre of the stage containing the corpse of their victim, Ronald Kentley. From the outset, the audience is captivated, holding their collective breath in the darkness, listening to the plot unfold.

The stage is completely surrounded by the audience, which maximises the intimate, secretive atmosphere. When the lights finally come up, the audience are suddenly made aware of another row of people staring right back at them, which makes for unnerving viewing. Cast members sit amongst the front row of the audience, the lack of boundaries making the audience feel complicit in the dark dealings of Brandon and “Granno”.

Apart from the obvious uncomfortable humour generated by eating a formal buffet off a corpse in a chest, there are some great casting choices, including Holly McLay’s air-headed Leila, and Simon Ginty’s slowly unraveling Granno. However, the highlight of the performance has to be Paddy Loughman’s wonderfully formal and stiff Cadell, the lame ex-soldier poet, whose acerbic wit and bitter tones cut through the gentle conversation to get to the heart of the issue, the social hypocrisies of justice and punishment: "I’ve heard about assassins being brought to the Old Bailey, but never to justice."

The emotionally fraught conclusion to the play sees Granno sobbing on the floor, Cadell brandishing a sword and the once-arrogant Brandon increasingly desperate and fearful, attempting to justify his actions by referencing Nietzsche. It's a fitting climax to a play that addresses some of the arcane difficulties of this "queer, dark incomprehensible universe," to create a thought-provoking, intense performance.