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‘Sleuth’ @ Alliance Theatre
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
THEATER REVIEW. Grade: B -
Some people insist that Anthony Shaffer’s detective fiction send-up “Sleuth” is a one-twist wonder that’s as thinly worn as an old smoking jacket.
Others will argue that you don’t need an inspector’s magnifying glass to see that the 31-year-old English farce is a richly woven tapestry of bristling dialogue, social satire and pink lingerie.
Ooops. Make that “psycho-sexual politics.”
By the looks of the lavishly decorated, racially fine-tuned production at the Alliance Theatre, associate artistic director Kent Gash probably falls into the second category.
The minute Edward E. Haynes Jr.’s sumptuous country-house living room rolls into view, stealthy as a cat burglar, and the audience applauds, you know Gash is up to his old trick of fluffing so-so material to the nth degree. Got a dubious play? Make ’em cheer the window dressing. The stained glass windows and monumental staircase! The giant Buddha-head and the gilded Empire clock!
OK, I admit it. I love the set. And — this is really embarrassing — Carl Cofield’s radical makeover at the top of Act Two actually had me fooled for a good share of the scene. Did my snooze alarm malfunction?
If you aren’t familiar with this Agatha Christie-meets-Noel Coward dance of wit, about all we can reveal here is that it’s a tightly wound cat-and-mouse game between a successful crime-writing dandy named Andrew Wyke (David de Vries) and his wife’s travel-agent lover, Milo Tindle (Cofield).
Laurence Olivier played Wyke opposite Michael Caine’s Milo in a 1972 film treatment, and a new movie version, with screenplay by Harold Pinter, opens Nov. 9, starring Caine as Wyke and Jude Law as Tindle.
Cofield looks a little stiff when he first appears onstage. But as the night gnashes on, he sharpens his edge. He’s got to, if he wants to hold his own with de Vries, who attacks the multitudinous characters who spew forth from Wyke with scandalous aplomb. Wyke fancies himself as an intellectual heavyweight and “Olympian sexual athelete.” Yeah, right.
The fact that Cofield is an African-American actor playing an Englishman of Italian-Jewish descent is a casting tweak that underscores Wyke’s essential class snobbery and insecurity. It’s also a sign that Gash is delving into the fecund possibilities of human behavior.
What are Wyke’s true motivations? What is to believed and what is not? Who’s really in love with who? At the end of the day, “Sleuth” begs to be more than just a pretty set. The play may taste like a guilty pleasure at first bite, but it’s also possessed of an inner core that is deep, dark and devastating.
A lonely has-been. A grand staircase. A burst of gunfire. Perhaps it’s funny to think of “Sleuth” as a homoerotic version of “Sunset Boulevard.” But there it is.
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