Stage review: Deathtrap, Noel Coward Theatre

Deathtrap has so many games to play and so much fizz in its step it might as well be your little brother on his birthday.

Ira Levin's contrived black comedy places two playwrights - one old, blocked and bitter, the other young and striving - in the same contained space and has them prowl around each other in a dance of savage ambition.

Initially, though, it is Sidney Bruhl and wife Myra who appear to have the upper hand.

The hit-starved writer seizes upon the bankable script sent in by an upstart and invites him up to discuss a royalty-sharing collaboration - although outright theft begins to fringe his thoughts.

But to suggest the piece plays out in a languorous and linear fashion from this premise would be to miss the point. There are gasping moments of reversal as the audience is led headlong into a mischievous minefield.

Simon Russell Beale is the fulcrum of the piece as Bruhl - as dry and witty as a grizzly bear on a diet of dust and Wilde. His bravura comic turn in London Assurance flossed his substantial comedy chops and here they are deployed for more nefarious purposes.

Claire Skinner is wasted as rake-thin Myra but plays the dizzied house frau with neat compactness. Meanwhile Glee's Jonathan Groff brings along some of that TV series' dark polish as Bruhl's appallingly talented protégé.

This 1978 work by master craftsman Ira Levin is wonderfully daft in its post-modern pretensions.

The play we are watching may well be the play they are writing and, as the two collaborators ponder on a litany of devious surprises with which to stuff a second act, we await their verdicts nervously.

The script anticipates and answers the suspicions of the most hardened thriller aficionado. Levin confronts the trappings of the form head-on with grand overkill.

Forget a secreted pistol glimpsed in a drawer, Sidney's study is a chamber of portentous horrors with medieval weapons, Houdini handcuffs and an arsenal of ironmongery on every hook and wall.

An overdone clairvoyant is shoehorned in to relay all possible outcomes but, even armed with these warnings, the audience still requires a surgical collar to lessen the whiplash.

Veteran Estelle Parsons brings a scene stealing brio to the Dutch psychic Helga ten Torp, whining and wailing like there's no tomorrow which, for at least one member of the cast, may well be the case.

Deathtrap is so unashamedly convoluted and involving that by Curtain Down you're wondering to what extent the Exit sign is a grim foreboding of your own immediate future.

– From September 2010