Primly derided when it premiered in 1964 as “a milk-curdling essay in lower-middle-class nihilism” full of “forced laughs”, Joe Orton’s unabashedly bonkers play had tonight’s opening night audience chuckling loudly and freely throughout, and still raised gasps at the language and increasingly, and deliciously, unsettling plot.
Some productions may reach for undercurrents of poignancy or pathos in the tug between universal loneliness and selfishness, or the desperate aspirations of the lowest middle classes in that period. Director (and the new Young Vic Artistic Director) Nadia Fall and the excellent cast mine it for every twisted laugh and revel in the absolute absence of morality. We may no longer be outraged by lads in leather, affairs, unwed mothers or even murder, but Orton’s razor sharp lines still land and his hatred of the hypocrisy of the veneer of public decency still excoriates.
At its twisted heart is Outhwaite’s toweringly monstrous Kath. A meticulously constructed mix of those Ealing comedies affected vowels, delirious ditziness and initially concealed calculating cunning, she flips from cougar to cooingly maternal, from a transparent négligée to rummaging for her false teeth under the chaise. Her delivery of Orton’s ornate, artificially exaggerated dialogue is a dream, a dark comedic masterpiece.
Kath has lured handsome young Sloane to her crumbling house to be a tenant, with a gimlet eye on making him both lover and surrogate son. The chintzily faded property stands alone next to a huge rubbish dump, the sole building of a development that never, well, developed. Staged in the round, broken furniture circles the action while a giant intricate sculptural spiral of bed frames, birdcages, prams etc hangs overhead, both the remnants of numerous lives and symbols of all that has blown apart below. It’s stunning.
Former Rizzle Kicks pop star Jordan Stephens makes his stage debut as the handsome young man who will restart two lives and end a third. Initially rather a blank page for Kath and then her self-made brother Ed to project their hopes and desires upon, he flaunts his physical assets and smirks in self-satisfaction. But as he increasingly appears to get what he wants, his performance deepens, as we (and eventually he) realise that actually he may be the most lost of all, and the victim of those very traps he is so cockily setting.
Daniel Cerqueira’s Ed is wonderfully preening and pompous, the most concerned of all about public appearances. He matches Outhwaite in his mastery of Orton’s meter but unlike Kath, Ed is in denial about his own desires. He’s gloriously unable to hear himself, like when Sloane asks for an Aston Martin and he declares, “I wish I could give you one.” Oh, we’re sure you do, Ed…
Christopher Fairbank is fantastically decrepit as the mouldering, shambling patriarch Kemp, the only one who sees through Sloane and knows of his past heinous crime.
Amid the zingers and pitiless social satire, there are jolting moments of violence and references to rape that can still shock jaded modern audiences. And in a world and sociopolitical climate where morality, decency and the truth are under bitter attack, the behaviour of Kath, Ed and Sloane still remains jaw-dropping in its blatancy.
Reducing the three acts to two halves delivers an absolute joyride before the interval. Upon its return, the pacing falters, it definitely sags for a stretch, and most definitely suffers when the electrifying Outhwaite is off-stage. But it finds and builds momentum towards a wonderfully warped ending that I found, perhaps worryingly, deliciously satisfying.
Mr Sloane may get his comeuppance, but the royal we are most wonderfully entertained.
ENTERTAINING MR SLOANE AT THE YOUNG VIC TO NOVEMBER 8