Deathtrap - Theatre Royal Review

★★★★☆

The Colin McIntyre Classic Thriller Season is back at Nottingham’s Theatre Royal, serving up a summer of suspense, intrigue and edge-of-your-seat drama. After opening with Death By Fatal Murder in week one, the company returned just days later with their second production, Ira Levin’s Deathtrap. With audiences already hooked and plenty of familiar faces returning for round two, the big question is: can the cast capture the darkly comic twists and nail-biting tension that made Deathtrap the longest-running comedy-thriller in Broadway history?

Andrew Ryan as Sidney Bruhl. Credit: Whitefoot Photography

Deathtrap follows Sidney Bruhl, a once-successful playwright now struggling with writer’s block and dwindling relevance. When one of his students, Clifford, sends him a brilliant script titled Deathtrap, Sidney jokingly muses with his wife about killing Clifford and passing off the play as his own. What begins as a wickedly playful idea quickly spirals into a tense game of deception, manipulation, and betrayal, where no one is quite who they seem and every twist is sharper than the last. The play toys with its audience as much as its characters, blurring the line between fiction and reality in a way that leaves viewers second-guessing until the final curtain.

It has to be said, Levin’s writing shines. A play that tells you what’s about to happen, yet still shocks you when it does, might sound like a magic trick, but that’s Deathtrap’s genius. With Chekhov’s gun (and dagger, and axe, and crossbow) planted early and foreshadowing turned into a twisted game, Levin crafts a play that feeds you truth only to snatch it right back.

The cast delivers the cunning, suspenseful edge the material demands—though the American accents were questionable at times. 

Andrew Ryan commands centre stage as Sidney Bruhl. It’s a role that demands both charisma and calculation. Sidney has to be likeable enough that the audience wants to follow him, but slippery enough that we’re never quite sure if we should trust him. Ryan steps into that balance with real skill. His voice, deep and resonant, carries the authority of a man used to controlling the room, while his posture perfectly conveys a character clinging to dignity even as his career unravels. He is commanding and in charge of the stage, but crucially never so dominant that the character feels unassailable. Andrew Ryan more than rises to that challenge, giving us a protagonist who is equal parts charming, calculating, and fatally flawed.

Pavan Maru as Clifford Anderson, Andrew Ryan as Sidney Bruhl, and Sarah Wynne Kordas as Myra Bruhl. Credit: Whitefoot Photography.

Pavan Maru mirrors that energy as Clifford Anderson, Sidney’s eager young student who arrives with a promising new script in hand. Clifford begins the play as bright-eyed and painfully naive, before twisting into something far more calculating and dangerous. Maru pitches it beautifully. His early scenes have a naturalistic charm, full of boyish enthusiasm and an open, likeable presence, which makes his eventual turn towards cold manipulation all the more chilling. Watching him shed layers of innocence and morph into something sharper and more sinister is one of the production’s great pleasures. He makes Clifford believable at every step, and his seamless transformation keeps the audience hooked — exactly what this role demands.

As for the supporting cast, they each bring real texture to the production. Sarah Wynne Kordas delivers a wonderfully dramatic turn as Myra Bruhl, her troubled energy always simmering beneath the surface, making her sudden collapse into a fatal heart attack shocking. Jeremy Lloyd Thomas, as lawyer Porter Milgrim, is coolly in control, measured and matter-of-fact in a way that grounds the play’s more heightened moments. His performance could so easily have felt like an exposition dump, yet he brings clarity and precision to the role, keeping the narrative taut. And then there’s Susan Earnshaw, who might just be the dark horse of the show. Earnshaw’s Helga ten Dorp is brilliantly funny with great comic timing, both physically and vocally. She manages to inject levity without undercutting the suspense. Together, the trio enrich the story, offering dramatic weight, narrative drive, and sparkling humour without ever stealing the limelight, but makes the whole show far stronger.

The set for Deathtrap is deceptively simple — a writer’s desk, a scattering of chairs, and a couple of doors for dramatic entrances and exits - and let's not forget the arsenal of weapons on the wall. Small shifts, such as a new desk or a change in lamp, give a subtle sense of time passing, while grounding us firmly in Sidney Bruhl’s world of plots and manuscripts. And, of course, no murder mystery would be complete without a drinks table; though it’s more symbolic than functional, it’s a comforting staple of the genre.

What does let the staging down, however, is a recurring frustration of the Classic Thriller Season: the overuse of blackouts and curtain drops between scenes. Too often, the momentum is broken just when the suspense is beginning to build. At one point, the curtain even fell on Clifford typing, only to rise a full minute later on… Clifford is still typing. It’s a device that risks pulling the audience out of the tension, forcing each new scene to work twice as hard to win us back.

Where the technical elements do score points, though, is in the sound and lighting. David Gilbrook’s sound cleverly evokes the play’s late-1970s setting, with subtle soundscapes that heighten the unease without ever tipping into melodrama. Michael Donoghue’s lighting is equally effective, particularly the use of blistering spotlights at the close of each scene, with characters breaking the fourth wall to deliver a pointed line directly to the audience. It’s a stylish flourish that fits the genre perfectly. Credit, too, must go to director Karen Henson, who ties all these threads together into a taut, entertaining whole.

In the end, Deathtrap is as gripping as it is entertaining, and it demands to be seen. Yes, there are niggles, the occasional accent wobble, the distracting wig and costume choices for Myra, and those patience-testing blackouts, but when the play is this well-crafted, and the cast this committed, those irritations can be forgiven. Levin’s script remains a masterpiece of suspense theatre, and this company has brought it to life with pace, humour, and bite. Especially when you consider they put this together in such a short turnaround. Bravo!

Most importantly, Deathtrap feels like a huge step up from last week’s Death by Fatal Murder. If this is the trajectory the company is on, then Richard Harris’s The Business of Murder next week is already shaping up to be unmissable.