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by Anthony Shaffer, directed by Marti Maraden

Drayton Entertainment, St. Jacobs Country Playhouse, St. Jacobs

October 4-21, 2012

Wyke: “Playing the game is what every gentleman does.”

If you’re interested in two hours of mind-bending entertainment, you need only head over to the St. Jacobs Country Playhouse to take in Drayton Entertainment’s new production of Sleuth.  The play is notable as the Drayton debut of director Marti Maraden, former Artistic Director of English Theatre for the National Arts Centre; actor, director and in 2008 co-Artistic Director of the Stratford Festival; and actor and director at the Shaw Festival.  She brings her wealth of experience to Anthony Shaffer’s 1970 witty thriller and draws strong, multilayered performances from its leading actors. 

For those who may never have seen the play before or either of the two film versions of it – one in 1972 and one in 2007 – the story is set in the study of mystery writer Andrew Wyke in a rambling manor house in Wiltshire, England.  Wyke is famous for his series of St. John Lord Merridew mysteries featuring a Father Christmas-like sleuth who consistently solves murders that have stumped the police.  He is a practitioner and lover of the old-fashioned style of mystery novels of Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie (though they are not mentioned) with ingenious puzzle plots set among the upper classes and deplores the rise of the police procedural that has come to take its place.

As the play opens Wyke (Victor A. Young) has just finished the dénouement of his latest mystery, Body on the Tennis Court, which he reads gleefully out loud doing all the characters’ voices.  Eventually, the guest he has been expecting, the travel agent Milo Tindle (James Kall), arrives.  After various pleasantries Wyke asks the much younger man the surprising question whether Tindle intends to marry his wife Marguerite.  Contrary to what we might expect, Wyke shows no jealousy at al toward Tindle, with whom his wife has been having an affair.  Wyke claims that divorcing Marguerite will take a burden from him, releasing him from her inane conversation and spendthrift habits.  Wyke wants to make sure Tindle will marry her so that she will not return to him.

Wyke has divined that there is a problem.  Tindle has no money and Marguerite has champagne tastes. How does Tindle plan to help Marguerite live in the style to which she has grown accustomed?  As it so happens, Wyke has devised a solution to Tindle’s problem.  All Tindle has to do is to disguise himself as a burglar, break into Wyke’s house and steal Marguerite’s jewelry which is worth a fortune.  Wyke has even chosen a fence for the jewelry in Amsterdam who will give Tindle an advantageous rate.  Meanwhile, Wyke and Tindle will feign a scuffle in which Wyke is knocked unconscious and Tindle escapes.  Since the jewelry is insured, Wyke will claim the insurance money and thus both will win. 

Tindle is drawn into Wyke’s scheme, unaware that Wyke’s plot is an elaborate game.  I won’t reveal the extent to which it is a game, but the story fits into the theme of human interactions as games that were so prominent in plays and novels in the 1960s and early 1970s.  Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) is probably the most famous example of this theme where each of the three acts is given the name of the game that the unscrupulous hosts are playing with their naive guests.  In fiction, John Fowles’ novel The Magus (1966) deals with a young man who gets caught up in the “godgame” played by a wealthy recluse.  More directly, Wyke’s use of games is inspired by the intricate plots of mystery novels written in the golden age of the genre.  Christie’s plots especially depend on the villain indulging in an elaborate charade.  Thus, in the popular form of the thriller, Shaffer is able to make us consider such larger questions as how we can tell truth from lies or what it is that makes us trust another person.

Maraden has drawn top-notch performances from both Young and Kall.  Young plays Wyke as both an eccentric and as a man who is playing an eccentric.  Much of the fun is trying to evaluate when he is or is not playing a role for his guest.  We see that he is devious and calculating but also that can get authentically get carried away with his own thoughts.  This is the first time I have seen Young in a purely non-musical part and it is marvellous to watch an actor so fully in command of the shifting mental states of his character. 

I have never seen Kall in a major part before but I’m glad I have.  He makes Tindle’s move from wariness and distrust to acceptance of Wyke’s bizarre scheme completely believable which is essential for the play to work.  He shows how Tindle gradually gets caught up in Wyke’s enthusiasm to the point where he doesn’t realize the humiliating aspects of the scheme he’s bought into – such as wearing a clown disguise for his burglar’s outfit and by ignoring some of Wyke’s deliberately sinister slips of the tongue. 

Allan Wilbee has designed a set that suggests that Wyke manor is more of a massive pile than a gorgeous showpiece.  The mingling of stone walls and a wooden staircase suggests and uncomfortable space and captures the dual nature of its chief resident, a strange mixture of order and disorder.  Jenine Kroeplin’s period costumes (yes, 1970 has become a period) accurately reflect the personalities of the two rivals and what they become.   

At the end of Act 1, it’s hard to see that there can be anything more to follow.  But, in fact, the best is yet to come.  Maraden has carefully paced the action from its leisurely beginning to increasing tension that will cause you to jump at certain revelations.  Maraden has looked so carefully into the action that she makes us aware of the paradox that even as Wyke and Tindle are struggling against each other, they are also bonding.  It is this aspect of the play, more than the game-playing that subsequent works have so much imitated, that makes this production of Sleuth so unsettling.  With Maraden, Young and Kall are at the top of their game, this is exciting high-calibre entertainment.

   

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: James Kall and Victor A. Young. ©2012 Drayton Entertainment.

For tickets, visit http://draytonentertainment.com.