Patrick Hamilton's 1929 thriller, which he himself claimed was nothing more than "a De Quinceyish essay in the macabre", makes a bizarre choice for the festive season. But, although the piece has lost some of its flesh-creeping power, it is stylishly done in Roger Michell's swift, interval-free production.
Michell also shifts the focus. Traditionally, the piece is seen as a study of two Oxford undergraduates who, in committing a murder to show their freedom from moral restraints, hold the mirror up to Nietzsche. Given the piece was partly inspired by the American Leopold-Loeb case, it is also natural to highlight its gay subtext. But Michell seems less interested in the killers than in their charismatic guest, Rupert Cadell, at a party staged around a chest containing the victim's body.
Rupert, a war-damaged Wildean poet filled with ennui, is the play's most original creation. Bertie Carvel suavely demonstrates that Rupert is a man who minces everything but his words, but also reminds us that the play is really about the character's moral awakening: Carvel offers a riveting portrait of an affected nihilist who discovers the hollowness of his credo, that the slaughter of 1914-18 has devalued individual murder.
Blake Ritson exudes hubristic vanity as the principal killer, Alex Waldmann is plausible as his hysterical accomplice and Phoebe Waller-Bridge deftly portrays a bright young thing.
I would question one or two of Michell's added melodramatic flourishes and he can't disguise the predictability of its cat-and-mouse games. But it is Carvel's Rupert that justifies the revival and, when he delivers a haunting speech about night-time London and the "folly of pleasure", he gives us a rare glimpse of Hamilton's own poetic melancholia.
