Sleuth at the Idaho Shakespeare Festival

Or: So You Want to Play Games?

A stately English manner house. A distinguished writer with a flair for the dramatic. Wife and servants decamped for the weekend. And a flamboyantly dressed young London bloke come round at the lord of the manner’s request. And what ensues is an evening of banter, teasing, costumes, raw need, and games that go a little too far.

And no, it’s not quite what you're thinking. Rather than a homoerotic romp, mystery writer Andrew Wyke (David Anthony Smith) has invited the sharp young Milo Tindle (Jeffery Hawkins) over to explore a crime, one that could have serious repercussions for them both. Written in the 1970, Sleuth is not shy with offering us a branch of low hanging fruit, as it were, and the current production is at its best when it hits either its grizzliest or its gayest.

The scenic and costume design (By Gage Williams and Esther M. Haberlen, respectively) are rich, intricate, full of character and hold myriad clues for the oncoming action. The twists and murderous oneupmanship between the two men teeters on the edge between cynically obvious and grippingly uncertain (He can’t be serious, that’s all a bluff. Or is it?)

Smith luxuriates in Andrew’s eccentricities, his voice cartwheeling into characters as he imagines his grand heist, and drops bon mot after bon mot with Wildean elegance. This veneer often spills over to the moments of threat, but there is something wonderfully horrid about Andrew’s jingoistic disdain for his compatriot (poignantly ugly in a post Brexit world) as well as his constant disparagement of his wife, Marguerite, however brilliant they are.

Hawkins gives a masterful physical performance, Milo’s easy self assuredness listing as he downs more and more of Andrew’s scotch, until on his own Riddler tear he pounces and shimmies and glides around the state. He slides from charming into dangerous and swings right round the pillar again. It’s one of those palimpsest of acting; you don’t sit there thinking, ooh how well that man moves, but as you walk out under the stars, you find that he’s directed and told an interior story as much with his whole form as the words in his mouth. Far from either being simple foils, the two actors swap stances and build off each other, cross pollinating their performances. A particularly eviscerating discouragement of Andrew’s life and work by Milo, not only swaps status and power and sympathy, but the very breeze: the young stranger not even bothered but pleased to hammer his nails into Andrews ribs, while the arrogant don shakes not with shame or bluster but with betrayal.

It’s a knock down drag out winner takes all kind of evening, with both Smith and Hawkins lathered as racehorses by the end and the stage shot literally and metaphorically to pieces. The shocked chuckles of the audience and the tearful groans when calamity is piled on cruelty, chase the action from curtain to curtain, never quite knowing what comes next but filled with a gut-chilling suspicion.