Word: wyke
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...Andrew Wyke (rhymes with "like," but in this production incorrectly pronounced "wick"), the mystery novelist who invites his wife's lover to his home for a battle of wits Sam Bloomfield has an acceptable British accent and a smooth, resonant voice. But his characterization is superficial--a lot of surface bluster with little going on underneath. He has no spontaneity; the words sound as though he has said them too many times before, and he takes no delight in his own verbal cleverness. It is not a bad performance, but Wyke is a tantalizing character--a child clinging stubbornly...
...Many people say his true greatness was in the theater, but Olivier has rendered many memorable film performances: Hamlet, Henry, Richard, Othello, Astrov, Strindberg's Captain, and to a lesser, though often equally delightful extent, Heathcliff, Archie Rice in The Entertainer, Graham Weir in Term of Trial and Andrew Wyke in Sleuth. Perhaps, many hope, he will return to the stage someday, if not to undertake a more mature Lear (he did it in '46 at the Old Vic), then perhaps to portray Prospero. There are those of us who would swim the Atlantic for a chance to see that...
...Agatha Christie, but even ignoring its dubious dramatic value, the form was always limited. Having exhausted all possible realistic variations, it is not surprising that the thriller playwright has had to turn the form in on itself, self-consciousness being the last available twist. The character of Andrew Wyke, the bigoted, infantile, impotent detective novelist in Anthony Shaffer's Sleuth, was the logical culmination of the mystery-writer's view of himself in a world where such structured escapism has become frustratingly antiquated. It was an opportunistic out for Shaffer, himself a writer of second-rate mysteries, but Sleuth...
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...
...themselves, making another character and providing relief from the constant dialogue. He was wrong, as many critics have been quick to point out. But his idea is still effective, to my mind, not because it makes an extra person but because the living room filled with lively figures extends Wyke's character into the complex fantasy of his fiction. Like Wyke's books, the automata are by no means puerile, though both belong to the realm of extended childhood...