"Good performances and tight direction make this production very strong. It is an unpretentious interpretation of a play that has the power to shock."
Oxford Student - click here for full review"the strong cast treats the dialogue with great dynamism ... A fine production of a very interesting and disturbing play"
Cherwell - click here for full reviewAlso reviews now up from Oxford Times and Dailyinfo
Show photos can be seen here.
From the director of The Myth of Prometheus and the world premiere of Orton's Fred and Madge comes this outrageous and funny satire on sex in the 60s - a slick black comedy from the author of What the Butler Saw and Loot
Young Mr. Sloane is looking for parents to love. His middle-aged landlady is looking for a baby. Her younger brother is looking for some action. Their elderly father is in the way.
When you're an orphan, you can choose your family. And when your old man's past it, it's time to get a new one.
Entertaining Mr. Sloane comes to the Old Fire Station Theatre, Oxford, from 23rd to 27th April 2002. For more information click here.
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Sloane and Oedipus: Foundlings and Sex.
by James Methven (Director)
Kemp: I'm going to die, Kath - I'm dying.
Kath (angrily): You've been at that ham, haven't you?
Orton had been at everything when he wrote Entertaining Mr Sloane. Pastiche of register renders the language slippery as a bucketful of elvers. At one moment we might find echoes of popular fiction; at another the language of the policeman, or of the judge; emotion rampages as in a B movie romance; the jargon of the advertising world intrudes; medical advice and pop-psychology take a kick; journalese suffers (and rightly); cliche is rampant (incidentally Orton's favourite way of presenting himself to the world); banal colloquialisms, formulaic speech, straight melodrama, the language of desire clothed in boredom, double entendres inverted with a twist: all are part of Orton's box of tricks. The disjunctive gap between the reality being described and the tone of the dialogue leaves an audience unsettled; where does meaning lie in this farrago of fiction? Who is telling the truth? Is anyone? Solipsism abounds.
"Entertaining Mr Sloane, all proportions kept, is the Northanger Abbey of our contemporary stage." (Harold Hobson in the Sunday Times)
Like the bed-sit he shared with Halliwell, obsessively decorated with contiguously jarring images cut from library books, Sloane is a brilliantly-executed collage of language, technique and tradition. It is a bizarre farce that takes as its fons et origo Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, making the return of the sexually-active son to the tragic home the crux of its plot. The setting of Sloane, a house in the middle of a rubbish dump, is a tragic site resonant of Orton's hatred of family; a misogynistic homosexual, each of his plays destroys the idea of family regardless of the other targets of his rage. Loot (1966) sees a son hide his mother's body in a wardrobe while he fills her coffin with the proceeds of a bank robbery. What the Butler Saw (1967) climaxes with the revelation that a father has assaulted his daughter, while her twin brother has photographed himself making love to his mother in the very place where years ago the missing children were conceived. Sloane contains a dysfunctional family (Kemp, Kath and Ed; father, daughter and son), a missing mother (though Kath takes to the role with gusto), and a cuckoo in the nest who might just have accidentally roosted in the very place he ought not.
The values of society? What values? The things we take seriously will be laughed at in fifty years." (Orton & Halliwell, The Boy Hairdresser, 1960)
The oddness of Sloane's sexual tuning is marked. In her teens, Kath has had an illegitimate baby boy by her younger brother's homosexually dallying 'matie', Tommy. In revenge, Ed ensures that the child is adopted. Kath loses her dignity, her lover and her child. Ed loses his soul mate and sets about a life of betterment through crime. Unmarried at the ages of forty-one and thirty-seven respectively, Kath and Ed are locked into a relationship neither wishes to acknowledge. The possibility of incest is ever before them. Ed can only function sexually by fucking men who also fuck his sister; at this remove, sexual memory tracing Kath's body upon Sloane's in Ed's bed provides an irresistible illicit thrill. The emotional punch-line of the show comes in the closing page when with a fine inevitability Kath and Ed agree to take turns at entertaining Mr Sloane, six months at a time. It is the final piece in the mosaicist jigsaw Orton has been constructing. Comparing Pinter's The Homecoming (1965) to Sloane (1964), Orton wrote: "Harold, I'm sure, would never share someone sexually. I would. And so Sloane springs from the way I think. The Homecoming doesn't spring from the way Harold thinks" (Diary, 11 July 1967). What is peculiar is the disgust expressed by both siblings at each other's sexual choice; they are unwilling to admit their needs, cloaking outright insult behind such euphemisms as 'unnatural' or 'clean living'. Orton's joke is that sexual appetite is endlessly funny: a middle-aged woman stalking a boy's cock and an older man chasing his arse are both without the ability to recognize the comedy they present to others.
"When you're dead, you'll regret not having fun with your genital organs." (Orton's Diary, 23 July 1967)
Like Oedipus, Sloane is young and has no family; he acquires one, and then kills the father. His reward is not just a Jocasta to bed, but a Creon prepared to ignore crime. Sophocles' concept of a moral curse that expels Oedipus from his rediscovered home does not work in Orton's modern version. Reworking and referencing Sophocles confused contemporary critics: how did a young working-class convict stumble across such ideas for his first play? While Orton liked to pretend that Sloane was his first piece of writing, he had spent over ten years in a literary apprenticeship being stuffed full of classical literature by Kenneth Halliwell. That sense of tradition bears fruit in the uncomfortable echoes and pressures worked into the text. Kath says that Sloane reminds her of her lover. He is the same age her son would be if she had not lost him. The words 'boy', 'baby', and 'brother' are troublingly unclear as signifiers in Kath's confused usage. 'Boy' could refer to boys; it could refer to a son; she also uses it to mean her teenage lover of twenty years ago, and she and Ed both use it of Sloane. 'Baby' Kath uses to mean child, and also sexual partner. If she is having a baby (and she has already decided it will be a boy), it will not be a 'brother' for her and Sloane as she claims, it will be their son. Unless, of course, she has been reading her Oedipus Rex and realizes what the implications are. Driven by an urge to replace the child she lost, Kath has her baby and uses him to give her another baby. Ed's fury at being caught 'committing some kind of felony in the bedroom' (homosexuality was illegal in 1964 when the play was first performed) has fuelled twenty years of hatred against father and sister. He characterises his teenage homosexual activity as 'innocent', until Kath screwed up his relationship with Tommy by allowing heterosexual knowledge into the closed world of male camaraderie, symbolised by boxing, football, and the army.
"I find lust an emotion indistinguishable from anger." (Orton's Diary, 26 July 1967)
In Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, Jack finds that his fictional double life as 'John' and 'Ernest' conforms to a reality he has never known (he was christened 'Ernest John'); Sloane's fictional self, prepared to give out to his landlady and her brother, becomes Sloane's real self when the two of them trap him into the image he has adopted of the ambiguous dangerous man-child, as portrayed by young turks James Dean and Marlon Brando in the cinema of the 50s. Bisexual hooliganism is Sloane's final fate, his Adonis beauty shallowly hiding his chameleon nature. Self-invention sticks, as Orton was to find. Like his young creations (Hal and Dennis in Loot, Nick in What the Butler Saw, and Sloane), Orton managed two deliberate cultural shifts in his inventive presentation of his life. His autobiographical sketch for the programme for Sloane in '64 shaved his age from thirty-one to twenty-five, highlighted his working-class background, insisted on his educational failure (no '11 plus' for young John), revealed his time in prison and his time on the National Assistance since, talked of marriage and divorce, and finished with the disingenuous question, 'Is that enough?' With this mixture of truth, fiction and lie, Orton demonstrated that working-class autodidacts in the 60s could be every bit as cultured, every bit as assured and knowing, as those attending university. Further, by being photographed in his uniform of leather jacket and white T-shirt he showed that homosexuals need not conform to the stereotype of being 'sensitive' (a euphemism at the time for 'homosexual' and one which Ed denies), that tough masculinity was not a preserve of the heterosexual. In Orton's dissection of sexuality, compartments are not watertight; they leak and slop their messy contents. Finally, it is impossible to label Sloane and Ed as 'gay' or 'bisexual'; teasing out the possibilities of either's sexual history is a ticklish problem indeed.
Ed: Principles, boy, bleeding principles.
Orton's willingness to enact taboo material on stage and readiness to be photographed staring impassively to camera left the press in love with this new golden boy of the British theatre. Headlines such as 'It's still Fish and Chips for Joe Orton' or 'What Prison Did for This Playwright' sound as though they might have been penned by Orton himself. Self-conscious and contrived as his art is, it wriggles with delight in the knowledge that it is up there with the greats of the English tradition. His literary forebears run along a line that includes Marlowe, Congreve, Austen, Wilde, and the man he termed 'the master', Ronald Firbank. Add to that the trash he read in prison while locked up for twenty-three hours a day and you have the ingredients of an arch manner that, like Sloane's sexuality, defies labels.
Sloane: There are fascinating possibilities in this situation. I'd get it down on paper if I were you.
Questions of meta-theatricality aside, comic menace pulses through Sloane. The possibilities of bad sex, bad behaviour, bad background, bad upbringing, bad men, and one 'very bad boy' gave Orton all he needed to make his 'first play' an outrageous success, winning the London Critics' Variety Award for Best Play of 1964. As one outraged member of the public, Peter Pinnell, opined in the letters section of the Daily Telegraph: 'Sir - In finding so much to praise in Entertaining Mr Sloane, which seems to be nothing more than a highly sensationalised, lurid, crude and over-dramatised picture of life at its lowest, surely your dramatic critic has taken leave of his senses. The effect this nauseating work had on me was to make me want to fill my lungs with some fresh, wholesome Leicester Square air. A distinguished critic, if I quote him correctly, felt the sensation of snakes swarming around his ankles while watching it.' But Peter Pinnell, like so much else concerning Orton, was a fiction. Orton wrote the letter himself.
JCM April 2002
