I don't often attend plays - musicals are up my alley instead - but my interest in up-and-coming singer/actor Jonathan Groff drew me to see his new West End play, a revival of Ira Levin's Deathtrap. Deathtrap is a thriller with an interesting premise. Sidney Bruhl, a washed-up writer of thrillers (played by Simon Russell Beale) is contacted by a former student (Groff), who has written the perfect thriller and wants the older man to read it. Bruhl and his wife are desperate for another success, and half-seriously contemplate killing the young man and stealing his play. Bruhl invites the young man, Clifford, to his country house to look over the play, and things snowball from there. I won't spoil it, since the suspense and scares are quite well done. What I described above is all one should know before entering the theatre. While the above premise is clever, it's almost deceptive: the play certainly starts there, but it ends up veering off into completely different territory, with more tension, scares and suspense to come. Without giving anything away, it eventually starts to sound almost like the tiny meta-musical [title of show]: a thriller about itself, seemingly being created and enacted in front of your eyes. The play pokes fun at thriller writers while sticking the writers in a thriller. It's funny, and scary, completely unexpected, and highly recommended.
As fun as the play was, I had quite a time getting hold of the tickets in the first place! In our pursuit of cheap tickets, we discovered that £25 day tickets were available at the theatre box office. However, we feared that due to Jonathan Groff's popularity (stemming from the Broadway musical Spring Awakening and TV show Glee), we would not be able to buy tickets whenever we felt like going. We had this problem at HAIR as well: we wanted to buy the cheapest day tickets at 1:30 PM, but the lead actor's popularity meant that the tickets were sold out soon after the box office opened. The only option, we felt, was to arrive at the box office 2 hours early and be first in line for Deathtrap's day tickets. We got up early on a Saturday and took the tube to Leicester Square, where we planned to get in line and one person could hold our spot while the others grabbed breakfast. When we got to the theatre, there was only one person in line! "Wonderful," we thought, "we planned right! We'll get the day tickets for sure!" Well, yes we did, but not because of our planning -- it was because only one other person showed up after us. We still had a lovely time chatting with the girl who was there first: she was a half-Australian girl from Amsterdam who had taken an early bus from further north to see relatives and Deathtrap. We had a fresh breakfast from Pret A Manger as well, so the time went by quickly. Eventually, the box office opened at 10 AM and all 6 of us in line got our tickets. Our Australian-Dutch friend unfortunately got a matinee ticket, while we went with evening tickets. All day tickets are in the front row at Deathtrap, and ours were right in the center. It was worth the early rise: we were close but not too close, we couldn't see some of the action upstage but we could see every drop of sweat on the actors' faces (and, unfortunately, all of Jonathan Groff's infamous spitting). The cheap seats, plus a Pimm's with lemonade, plus an autograph and photo with the star himself, made for an adventurous and satisfying day at the Noel Coward!
Sean Roderick
UCLA
This looks like a real theatrical event, especially culminating in photographs with the play's star. This is a fascinating description of the 'process' of getting to theatre in London and would be of specific interest to theatre historians of the future who might want to study the social context of theatre-going. Dr Q
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