For immensely successful mystery writer Andrew Wyke, life is an elaborate game where others are merely pawns at his disposal. He has amassed wealth and fame as a best-selling author of murder mysteries featuring the great detective St. John Lord Merridew. Andrew lures his estranged wife's lover, Milo Tindle, to his country manor house and proposes a plan. Milo will 'steal' the jewels that Andrew owns and sell them abroad. Milo gets the cash, Andrew collects on the heavily insured jewels. The plan seems like a win-win situation for both men. What unfolds is a cat-and-mouse game of epic proportions as Milo becomes unwittingly drawn into a tangled web of intrigue and gamesmanship where nothing is quite as it seems.
Sleuth by Anthony Shaffer is set in the Wiltshire, England manor house of Andrew Wyke, an immensely successful mystery writer. His home reflects Wyke's obsession with the inventions and deceptions of fiction and his fascination with games and game-playing. He lures his wife's lover, Milo Tindle, to the house and convinces him to stage a robbery of her jewelry, a proposal that sets off a chain of events that leaves the audience trying to decipher where Wyke's imagination ends and reality begins.
Shaffer said the play was partially inspired by one of his friends, composer Stephen Sondheim, whose intense interest in games-playing is mirrored by the character of Wyke.
The play's first production, starring Anthony Quayle and Keith Baxter, was at London's St Martin's Theatre.
After four previews, the Broadway production, with Quayle and Baxter directed by Clifford Williams, opened on November 9, 1970 at the Music Box Theatre, where it ran for 1,222 performances.
