Word: sleuth
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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They are, manifestly, a diverse, and therefore amiable set of cruise companions, and unless one has read the book, it is impossible to break the case before Poirot does. The trouble with the thing is that though Shaffer (the author of Sleuth) can outline a highly stylized murder-mystery character, he seems to lack the energy to fill in the kind of details that can, in masterly hands, utterly charm and disarm. There are possibilities, for example, in the bickering of Davis and Smith, but they peter out. There are promising hints of giddiness in Farrow's lovelorn posturings...
...Molehill File by Michael Kenyan (Coward, McCann & Geoghegan; 192 pages; $7.95). There's no time for tea in this sardonic unraveling of Establishmentarian rottenness. The sleuth is doughty Detective-Inspector Henry Peckover, a passable published poet who can no more aspirate his aitches than preserve his skull from duggery. Relegated by Scotland Yard to a dead-end fraud investigation, he links the murder of a May fair tart to a web of political, financial and sexual hanky-panky that encompasses a titled M.P., a police chief superintendent who turns drag queen by night, Middlesex pols and proles, bird hunters...
...should damn a college drama society for producing an enormously difficult play. Although Anthony Shaffer's thriller Sleuth may not challenge a company the way a play by Ibsen or O'Neill does, in some ways the risks are even greater. In a naturalist classic, after all, the director and cast can strive for emotional honesty to compensate for a lack of maturity or finely-honed technique; Sleuth, however, is an exercise in style, and it demands a display of brazen theatrical exhibitionism, a roaring hamminess firmly entrenched in technical precision. The actors must savor Shaffer's dialogue, sputter...
...blandness that is most offensive here--the lack of subtlety or nuance. This Sleuth whizzes by without ever being felt, and although it cannot help but amuse, it does not punch. When a good comedy is not played right, a short pause occurs between the delivery of the line and the laughter from the audience--a pause where the audience reviews the words, and then realizes that they add up to something funny. But when the delivery is sharp, you feel yourself beginning to laugh even before the line is finished. That never happens in the Leverett production. Although director...
...small opening-night audience applauded so enthusiastically--because, what the hell, those guys worked up quite a sweat, and they didn't drop a line. But "workmanlike" should be the last adjective that Anthony Shaffer's scintillating thriller-symphony evokes. A pity, but all too literally, this Sleuth substitutes "uh-lan" for elan...