Inspired by the real life case of Americans Leopold and Loeb, Patrick Hamilton’s psychologically macabre 1929 thriller is an unpleasant study of a supposedly perfect Mayfair murder carried out as an intellectual exercise in Nietzschean superiority.
The initial exposition is clunky and it’s obvious that a panicky Granillo (the nervier of the two privileged Oxford undergrad perpetrators) will give the game away.
But this is a stylish revival, played in the round and at its best when Bertie Carvel’s effete, war-wounded poet Cadell challenges Blake Ritson’s chillingly composed Brandon who has not only orchestrated the strangulation of a fellow student but arrogantly invited the victim’s unsuspecting father and their vacuous friends to a supper served off the trunk which holds his body.
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