Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum

By T. E. Kalem

Writing a flawless murder mystery for the stage is probably rarer than committing the perfect crime. Anthony Shaffer has done it in Sleuth. Shaffer, twin brother of Peter Shaffer (The Royal Hunt of the Sun), has written a thriller that is urbanely clever, unashamedly literate, clawingly tense and playfully savage. If it is not the best play of its genre ever, it is neck and neck with the best.

The setting is the study of an English country house, the home of Andrew Wyke (Anthony Quayle), a successful mystery writer. Into the room comes Milo Tindle (Keith Baxter), a travel agent. Tindle has been having a surreptitious affair with Wyke's wife. After a swift courtesy drink has been poured, Wyke makes Tindle blink by saying, "I understand you want to marry my wife." "Well, yes," gulps Tindle, "with your permission, of course," and a duel to the death begins between the two men.

Present deponent will testify no further as to the plot. To say more would be a crime against pleasure and surprise. Among its bonuses, Sleuth is a consummate spoof of thrillers, as keen in satire as suspense. The evening moves from something like the erudite nonchalance of S.S. Van Dine to the venomous gaiety of the "get-the-guests" sequence in Virginia Woolf. In the key roles, Quayle and Baxter are lithe and lethal.

Core of Passion. Under its suavely British surface, Sleuth contains some bitterly anti-British sentiments. The celebrated games-playing vocabulary of the Englishwith terms like fair play and a sporting chanceis cant in Shaffer's view. It masks some bloody-minded bigotry and is no sounder a guide to the British national character than the ritualized tea ceremony is to that of the Japanese. Wyke is very pukka. Tindle is half Italian with a half-Jewish father. Wyke can be loftily amusing about this ("Some of my best friends are half-Jews"), but he can also spit with rage ("a wop, a yid, a not-one-of-me face"). This is a seething ethnic confrontation and it gives Sleuth a core of passion that most mysteries, and all too many plays, lack.

qedT.E. Kalem

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