Dime-Store Detectives

NO ONE should damn a college drama society for producing an enormously difficult play. Although Anthony Shaffer's thriller Sleuth may not challenge a company the way a play by Ibsen or O'Neill does, in some ways the risks are even greater. In a naturalist classic, after all, the director and cast can strive for emotional honesty to compensate for a lack of maturity or finely-honed technique; Sleuth, however, is an exercise in style, and it demands a display of brazen theatrical exhibitionism, a roaring hamminess firmly entrenched in technical precision. The actors must savor Shaffer's dialogue, sputter and sing it in every conceivable register, deliver it with an awareness so heightened that the words become daggers. In the Leverett House production they do not; the dialogue is rattled off racehorse-style, reduced to snippy banter that makes Anthony Shaffer sound like a British Neil Simon.

It is the blandness that is most offensive here--the lack of subtlety or nuance. This Sleuth whizzes by without ever being felt, and although it cannot help but amuse, it does not punch. When a good comedy is not played right, a short pause occurs between the delivery of the line and the laughter from the audience--a pause where the audience reviews the words, and then realizes that they add up to something funny. But when the delivery is sharp, you feel yourself beginning to laugh even before the line is finished. That never happens in the Leverett production. Although director Tim Garry has paced the show far too fast--with the exception of the physical business called for in the script, where things grind to a dead halt--he has not given the actors any clues about proper emphasis. The wistful and the exuberant sound alike, and the unvarying rhythm grows monotonous.

Garry has chosen the wrong vehicle for his directorial debut. Presumably, he assumed that with only two (oops--five) characters and a single set, this would be an easier show to handle than most. But Shaffer's intricate cat-and-mouse thriller requires visual flamboyance, as its two adversaries wind about each other, the tension mounting as the roles of cat and mouse are juggled and exchanged. Garry's blocking is too straightforward: get up, sit down, walk up the stairs, pace a little. There is a bit of original stage business involving some darts at the beginning of the play, but I honestly can't recall any after that.

As Andrew Wyke (rhymes with "like," but in this production incorrectly pronounced "wick"), the mystery novelist who invites his wife's lover to his home for a battle of wits Sam Bloomfield has an acceptable British accent and a smooth, resonant voice. But his characterization is superficial--a lot of surface bluster with little going on underneath. He has no spontaneity; the words sound as though he has said them too many times before, and he takes no delight in his own verbal cleverness. It is not a bad performance, but Wyke is a tantalizing character--a child clinging stubbornly to the bogus world of titled detectives, plodding inspectors, and stuffy drawing-rooms--and Bloomfield misses practically every opportunity to make him ingratiating.

Smart theatergoers should probably blame the director for Andy Sellon's Milo Tindle. Sellon, clearly a talented actor, breezes into Wyke's mansion, his teeth gleaming obscenely, and proceeds to act as though he's been there on countless earlier occasions. Perhaps Sellon intends to play Tindle as a rather shallow gigolo, but he is not right for that interpretation--besides, Shaffer has taken great pains to show us a much more complex, sympathetic character, a young man understandably baffled by his host's odd behavior. Sellon's ultra-smooth Milo forgets to be incredulous. He improves in his later scenes, when the ordeals he undergoes, and his eventual mastery of the situation; give him a harried, tousled, wildeyed look, and at last his archness seems appropriate--but even here a good director should have toned him down a bit.

OBVIOUSLY, HOUSE productions cannot afford to spend much money on sets, but that does not excuse the lack of imaginative detail in Wyke's drawing-room. It was a clever idea to turn the Leverett House Old Library around on its axis, so to speak, converting the staircase that the audience descends into the theater into the staircase of Wyke's mansion. Beyond that, however, there is only a smallish fireplace, some dull furniture and a few half-hearted pokes at interesting knick-knacks. To convey Wyke's obsession with sophisticated games, Garry gives us a few propped-up commercial board games such as "Master Mind," and the so-called "ancient Chinese blocking game" is nothing more than a small, beat-up chess set.

Worse are the lapses that occur in the course of the action. Sellon, for example, mispronounces the word "elan" as "uh-lan." And one of the funnier lines in the play--Wyke's remark of his wife, "She couldn't get Johann Strauss to waltz"--comes out, "She couldn't get Johann Strauss to waltz." That means, I suppose, that she couldn't get Johann Bach to waltz, either. Moreover, any self-respecting mystery buff can tell you that a "mashie-niblick," that jolly skull-splitter, is a five-iron; Bloomfield ludicrously brandishes a driver. All this may sound like nit-picking, but these errors are a fraction of those actually committed, and they all add up to a general impression of carelessness.

It seems cruel to dwell on the faults of a production this small, where a critic cannot spread the blame around, or perhaps mitigate his criticism by citing a strong chorus. Maybe that is why the small opening-night audience applauded so enthusiastically--because, what the hell, those guys worked up quite a sweat, and they didn't drop a line. But "workmanlike" should be the last adjective that Anthony Shaffer's scintillating thriller-symphony evokes. A pity, but all too literally, this Sleuth substitutes "uh-lan" for elan.