Sleuth

Sleuth invites a younger man to a country house belonging to a successful crime novelist, offers him a drink and then proposes a game. The novelist already knows the visitor is sleeping with his wife. The game is not really a game.

Andrew Wyke writes detective fiction and treats other people as material. Milo Tindle arrives expecting an awkward conversation and finds himself talked into staging a burglary, for reasons that make perfect sense right up until they do not. What follows is a duel of humiliations in which each man takes his turn at being in charge, and the audience is never allowed to be certain which of them is being played.

Anthony Shaffer wrote the play, which opened in 1970 and took the Tony Award for Best Play. It is written for a very small cast in a single set full of games, automata and clutter, and its plotting has been imitated so often that the original still catches out people who assume they know the shape of it.

The pleasure lies in the reversals, and in the class hatred humming underneath them: one man is established in a way he never stops signalling, the other is not, and every trick has that somewhere inside it. The comedy is cruel, the tension is real, and the play is careful never to let the audience settle.

It suits audiences who like thrillers that argue with them. It works best live, where the two performers are close enough that you can watch each of them decide to lie.