Programme note
The Deadly Game
Director’s programme note by Patricia Goodman, 2006.
2006 season · Programme note
- Production
- The Deadly Game
- Director
- Patricia Goodman
- Ran
- March 17 – April 22, 2006
The note, as printed
The Deadly Game is a stage adaptation of the novel Trapps by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, an apt title considering the many traps which are laid (and sprung) throughout. Beginning with the setting — a secluded chalet in a remote region of the Swiss Alps — and the weather outside, a raging blizzard, play along in this deadly game and see just how many “traps” you can spy. Interesting to ponder!
The Deadly Game was made into a film in 1982, bringing together the considerable talents of George Segal, Trevor Howard, Robert Morley, Emlyn Williams and Alan Webb, with Leslie Dunlop, Brian Croucher and Connie Booth. The film made the cable rounds but has not appeared in the listings lately, to my knowledge.
I first read this play about fifteen years ago, and have been “dying” to direct it ever since. My gratitude to the Vic for giving me the opportunity.
Why this survives
Dürrenmatt’s 1956 novella has had an unusually long afterlife in adaptation — radio, television, film and at least two stage versions — because its premise is a complete play in a sentence: four retired lawyers pass the evening by trying a stranger for a crime he did not know he had committed.
The note is reproduced here as the theatre published it in 2006. The production page carries the synopsis, the cast and the notice the production drew.
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.