It's not often that a stage thriller is satisfying because of the quality of its dialogue, but most thrillers aren't Sleuth, Anthony Shaffer's delightful romp now playing at American Stage. In this story of two men both in love with the same woman, the real pleasure is in the language — as when portly Andrew Wyke insists that his wife "converses like a child of six, cooks like a Brightlingsea landlady and makes love like a coelacanth." Or when his rival Milo Tindle tells Andrew, a successful mystery writer, that his world is a dead one where "pert parlormaids cringe, weeping malapropisms behind green baize doors."
This isn't the language of Agatha Christie or John Grisham; it resonates with elegance. So does Scott Cooper's wonderful manor-house set, complete with sweeping staircase, overlarge windows and a full-size painting of the wife in question. The American Stage production has a few weaknesses — some key twists in Act 2 are too easy to see through, and actor Joe Parra, for all his talent, is hard to believe as an Englishman.
Still, Sleuth is great fun, both as a challenging mind game and as pure entertainment. And where else can one hear a cuckolded husband warn his rival that "In two years you'll be a used gourd. And what's more, a used gourd with a sizeable overdraft."
The story begins when Milo arrives at Andrew's house, and Andrew admits he's aware that Milo wants to marry Marguerite, the wandering wife with a taste for expensive pleasures. Successful mystery writer Andrew claims not to mind losing his thankless spouse, but he first wants Milo to involve himself in an apparent robbery that will leave both men rich. Milo is to steal 2 million pounds' worth of jewels from Andrew's safe and sell them to a fence in Amsterdam for 1.3-million — enough so that Milo can support Marguerite in style.
Andrew, meanwhile, will collect the insurance money, and both men will end up happy. Andrew provides Milo with a disguise, facilitates his breaking through a second-floor window and even blows open the safe for him with a plastic explosive. Then Andrew produces a gun, so he can claim that he surprised the burglar in flagrante delicto, there was a struggle — they shoot up the living room a bit— and finally Milo won the weapon and tied up Andrew. The plan seems airtight. And then the surprises begin.
Now, although there are five actors listed in the playbill, the success of Sleuth depends largely on the performers playing Andrew and Milo — and here the American Stage production is only partly persuasive. The more credible actor is Eric Davis, who has been missing from area stages for far too many months and who brings to his lothario character all the clarity and precision local audiences have come to expect from him. Davis' Milo is in every way the opposite of his rival: slim where Andrew is fleshy, decisive where Andrew is oblique, handsome and sexual where Andrew is a lump of aging humanity trying vainly to keep from falling into disrepair. Just watching Milo face off with Andrew in Act 1, you can understand immediately why Marguerite chose to stray; and when Andrew suggests that Milo won't be able to satisfy Marguerite's love of the finer things, Davis manages to suggest, with just a glimpse of vulnerability, that he knows Andrew to be right.
As Andrew, Joe Parra is not quite as convincing. Andrew Wyke is supposed to be a hyper-English novelist in contrast to the part-Italian, part-Jewish Milo (his father's original name Tindolini), but Parra has a Mediterranean look, and his English accent is chancy at best. Aside from these distractions, though, Parra's acting is likeable: He huffs and puffs his way across a room as if he hasn't exercised in decades; he allows his mind to wander off a subject like a writer long used to solitude; and he speaks of his wife with the palpable disdain of a man whose romantic side was crushed by department-store bills long ago.
Most important, Parra persuades us that Andrew is, at his very core, a "games-playing person" for whom "an arrangement of clouds, the secret mystery of landscape, a game of intrigue and revelation, mean more to me than people — even the ones I'm supposed to be in love with."
Ultimately, that's what Sleuth's about — a game of love and death — and Parra, accent or not, comes across as an avid gamesman. Whether he's met his match in Milo — well, that's where suspense comes in.
Unfortunately, that suspense is at its sharpest in Act 1 and not much after that. I can't fully explain why without giving away crucial plot twists, so I'll only say that certain secrets in the latter act are too easy to discern. Still, the play remains entertaining down to the very last surprise — which is a surprise — and if we don't have the pleasure of being utterly hoodwinked, we do get to see through a magician's artifice. Director T. Scott Wooten keeps the action moving swiftly; costumer Adrin E. Puente makes the most of the protagonists' class differences — and puts Milo in a very silly clown suit for the robbery — and Joseph P. Oshry's lighting is, as always, first class.
Shaffer says in his text that "games of all kinds adorn the room," and I wish that set designer Cooper had followed this stage direction more closely — it turns out, eventually, to be entirely relevant.
But even so, American Stage's Sleuth is stylish and tense and, at the end, unpredictable. I can only think of two other mysteries that are comparably provocative: Tom Stoppard's The Real Inspector Hound and Ira Levin's Deathtrap.
"I've played games," says Andrew Wyke, "of such complexity that Jung and Einstein would have been honored to have been asked to participate in them." Sleuth's not quite that cerebral; but it is, to quote Andrew again, "a great deal of not wholly innocent fun."
You'll have a good time there.
This article appears in Nov 14-20, 2007.