The point about a sub-text is that it’s supposed to stay sub-. Get it out front, bring it down stage, and shine a big follow spot on it, and the play tumbles over into the orchestra pit. But, alas, at Directing School, the chaps seem to be taught that that’s the way a director imposes his “vision” on the play. Given that 90 percent of sub-texts are apparently gay sub-texts, things can get a little tedious. There was a period back in the 1990s when no revival of a Noel Coward play was complete without a rendition of “Mad About The Boy” either as th e Act One closer or Act Two opener, if not somewhere more obtrusive. I would be interested to know if any director in theatrical history has ever identified a straight sub-text. Personally, I’d be very keen to see, say, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America with the hitherto neglected heterosexual sub-text placed front and center.

Until that happy day, we have to make do with a more predictable outing at the revival of Patrick Hamilton’s Rope. First staged in 1929, Rope bears a certain similarity to the Leopold and Loeb case of five years earlier, in which two wealthy young sports murdered a fourteen-year-old boy in Chicago, apparently for kicks. There have been over fifty books, three films, and I can think of at least two plays that tell their story—John Logan’s Never the Sinner takes a somewhat predictable there’s-a-Leopold-and/or-Loeb-inside-each-of-us approach, while Thrill