Joe Orton’s play caused a scandal when it premiered in 1964 and its provocative potency has diminished little over the decades. Rarely has the combination of sex, death and social hypocrisy been so uncomfortably hilarious. A young man is fought over by his rampant landlady and her brother who both seek sexual favours from him. Caught in the riptide is their disapproving, nearly blind father, Kemp, who believes the new tenant to be a murderer.
Played in the round, the minimal set is festooned with all manner of junk, including old chairs, bedsteads and bits of cars hanging perilously above the acting area as well as surrounding it. Half Pinter/half Beckett (with a hint of Steptoe & Son), it symbolises their isolated house next to a rubbish dump as well as a nether world in which the characters are trapped.
The theatre’s incoming Artistic Director Nadia Fall’s production is true to its origins, maintaining a pungent period flavour without reimagining it for the present era.
Tamzin Outhwaite is superb as Kath, the predatory landlady played previously by Beryl Reid and Imelda Staunton, among others. She delivers a blisteringly funny portrait of a slightly over the hill nymphomaniac who dresses inappropriately (“I’m in the rude under this dress”) and flirts outrageously with her young, well-muscled tenant Sloane (Jordan Stephens, of hip hop duo Rizzle Kicks) in his stage debut.
The arrival of Kath’s closeted gay brother Ed (Daniel Cerqueira, slyly coercive) sets the ball rolling for a black comedy of very rude manners that starts well before losing focus in the second half. It perks up towards the climax with the help of Sloane’s costume change (“Do you wear leather?”) and Christopher Fairbank’s Kemp whose louchely cantankerous commentary on his children’s perverted natures is endlessly amusing.
Still outrageous (maybe even more so in this era of delicate sensibilities) it makes the most of Orton’s singularly British cocktail of Carry On and Donald McGill augmented by an unadulterated satirical venom that was the playwright’s trademark.
ENTERTAINING MR SLOANE AT THE YOUNG VIC TO NOVEMBER 8