Word: bruhl
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...rule in reviewing thrillers is to be elusive. Tell the beginning but never tell the middle and the end. In the beginning, Sidney Bruhl (John Wood) is a guileful craftsman of stage thrillers who has a writer's block. It's a fairly long block, almost as wide and arid as the Sahara. For 17 years he has failed to concoct a Broadway...
Deathtrap is not the ingenious successor to Sleuth that Levin obviously wanted to write, but a desperate imitation of it. The same sorts of turn-arounds preponderate, and the playwright-protagonist, Sidney Bruhl (John Wood), as unscrupled as Wyke when it comes to murder, speaks in similarly sardonic conceits. But Levin, although he tries hard, has neither Shaffer's command of language nor his ability to make each epigram peculiarly illustrative of some aspect of character; Levin uses witticisms to fill pauses. To be fair, the script contains many very funny lines--assorted theater jokes, ESP jokes...
...play's advertising representatives have asked the critics not to reveal the plot, but this seems rather silly--Deathtrap is tricky in a very predictable way. One has little chance to be confused: Bruhl constantly discusses the theatrical potential of the murders he commits, and ten lines rarely pass without a plot recap. It's rather like the old math problem about the frog in the slippery well who cannot jump three feet without falling back two. In addition, Levin makes his characters as self-conscious as his playwrighting. "Nothing recedes like success," quips Bruhl, and is so taken with...
John Wood, however, late of the Royal Shakespeare Company, gives a bravura performance as Bruhl; it's amazing what a little style, diction, and well-placed resonance can do even for a role like this. Wood resembles a jack-in-the-box out of the box, his long, gangling figure springing about beneath a jolly mop of brown hair. Best is his voice, which he uses like a virtuoso, rasping out some lines, snarling others like Burgess Meredith, or shooting up into a terribly British falsetto a la Rex Harrison. He conveys the tremendous nervous energy trapped inside him, which...
...seem to be saying Mau Mau), the least alert reader can guess that the spirits imported by evil Mr. Lindelbaum are more vodka and voodoo than honest Scotch. South African-born Novelist van der Post (Venture to the Interior) has taken his theme from French Philosopher-Sociologist Lucien Levy-Bruhl: "Le reve est le vrai dieu des Primitifs [The dream is the real god of primitive peoples]." The Russians know that the far-flung Amangtak-wena tribe is expecting its chief witch doctor to have a "dream," i.e., to receive from the spirit world an oracular directive on tribal policy...