The Deadly Game

2006 season · Production archive

Howard Trapp is a wealthy, successful American businessman, the exclusive European sales agent for a prestigious textile company. His life is nearly perfect until his car goes into a snow bank on a remote road in the Alps. Through a blinding snowstorm he finds refuge in the chalet of Emile Carpeau, an elderly, genial former judge who entertains his friends with gourmet food, fine wine and a rather unusual game. Mr Trapp agrees to play along, only to find himself in a nightmare where his perfect life becomes a weapon wielded with deadly skill against him.

Adapted from the novel Trapps by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, The Deadly Game is a psychological thriller.

Written by

James Yaffe

Directed by

Patricia Goodman

Ran

March 17 – April 22, 2006

Cast

Dell Domnik · Wade P. Wood · Sarah Burley · Pete Nelson · Andy Anderson · Arthur Goodman · Jeff Garner · Priscilla Young

About the production

Dürrenmatt’s 1956 novella gives four retired lawyers a dinner game in which a stranded guest is tried for a crime he did not know he had committed. It is a chamber piece by construction — one room, one table, one long evening — and it is hard to imagine a venue better matched to it than a basement with a single entrance and no way for the audience to leave discreetly.

The director’s programme note for the production, kept in this archive, invites the audience to count the traps laid and sprung across the evening, starting with the setting and the weather.

What the press said

“James Yaffe’s wickedly mysterious capped-with-humor play…(is) a theatrical treat of well-done, well-performed, gifted theatre…rich character development by an enormously talented cast.”

Where it sat in the season

It was production 3 of 8 in the Vic’s 2006 season. It followed Dead Man Walking (Feb 23 – Mar 5, 2006) and was followed by Other People’s Money (May 5 – Jun 17, 2006). The full year is set out on the season calendars page, and every production the theatre staged between 2005 and 2011 is indexed in the production archive.

The house’s standard pattern was Friday and Saturday evenings at 7.30 with a Sunday matinee, over a run of six to eight weeks. With seventy-five seats, a full eight-week run put roughly 1,800 people through the room — which a 500-seat theatre does in four nights, and which is the single fact that explains most of what the Vic chose to programme.

Also in this section: the director’s programme note for this production.

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This page is part of the production archive of the Denver Victorian Playhouse, a seventy-five-seat theatre in the basement of a northwest Denver house that staged its last performance in 2011. Details here are restored from the theatre’s own records as they were published at the time; press quotations are reproduced with their original attributions and nothing has been added to them.