Iain Sinclair on Rope

Having earned his spurs over the last six years with a number of excellent, award-winning productions on Sydney's independent stages, Iain Sinclair broke through last year with his pitch-perfect production of Thornton Wilder's Our Town for Sydney Theatre Company's main stage. If you can make a popular American classic of that calibre come alive for Sydney critics and audiences alike then you can probably handle anything else thrown at you. Later this year, Sinclair will revisit the STC main stage with a production of Lorca's visceral romantic drama, Blood Wedding. First, however, he'll be taking on one of his favourite plays, by one of his favourite writers, in his favourite genre: Patrick Hamilton's Rope's End.

Widely considered one of the most perfectly written thrillers in the dramatic canon, Rope's End keeps audiences on the edge of their seats without ever leaving the apartment in which it is set, and without any actual violence. "As far as brooding intensity, it's just the kind of thing I love," Sinclair smiles, comparing it to Tracy Letts' Killer Joe, which he staged to spectacular effect in 2005 for B Sharp.

Although Alfred Hitchcock popularised it with his 1948 adaptation Rope (Sinclair's Rope is a combination of Hamilton's play and Hitchcock's screenplay), Rope's End was a theatrical sensation in its own right when it debuted in London's West End in 1929. After an extended, sell-out season it was remounted on Broadway, to similar acclaim - and went on to become one of only two successes in Hamilton's career (the other was Gas Light, also adapted for film), both of which kept him in liquor and relative luxury for the rest of his rather tortured existence.

Although Hamilton always strenuously denied it, Rope's End is widely considered to have been inspired by the Leopold and Loeb case of 1924, in which two young university graduates in America kidnapped, tortured and killed a 14-year-old boy - ostensibly on the basis of being morally exempt Nietzschean ‘supermen'. In any case, both the play and the movie, which reference the same philosophy, tapped into the Western world's anxiety about the rise of fascism.

As with Our Town, Sinclair's approach to this production has one eye on the past, and the other firmly on the now. Using an ‘archeological' approach to text that he picked up at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, he has mined and polished the elements of the play that speak to a modern audience, and set them against the visual panache of Hitchcock, and sartorial elegance of 1949 Manhattan.

Crucially, Sinclair envisions the killers less as the effete dandies of Hitchcock's film, than the handsome, athletic aristocrats Hamilton originally envisioned. "Like Mad Men, but with a very pronounced American Psycho feel to it," Sinclair suggests. "I've cast Anthony Gee and Anthony Gooley, who are both dapper men and charming bastards. And then if you make them deviants and sociopaths, well, then you've got an interesting story."

Rope Bondi Pavilion, 1-25 Jun

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