Entertaining Mr Sloane

JOE ORTON is one of that select group of playwrights, along with Shakespeare and Pinter, whose name has become an adjective.

Mathew Horne and Imelda Staunton Picture Robert Day Mathew Horne and Imelda Staunton (Picture: Robert Day)

‘Ortonesque’ refers to a world where people speak a language above their station, which gives them genteel cover for their lust and unbridled amorality.

The humour of it all lies in the contrast between what people say and what they actually do. Thus when the ageing landlady Kath reassures her soft-skinned young lodger Sloane, “I’ve had the upbringing a nun would envy – until the age of fifteen I was more familiar with Africa than my own body,” we can bet she’s actually a nymphomaniac.

So it’s bizarre that director Nick Bagnall has chosen to revive this brilliant first play as if it were naturalistic drama.

Imelda Staunton plays Kath at face value: needy, lonely and repressed, as if she has just wandered off the set of Vera Drake. As an acting job, it’s faultless. But inviting us to pity her, rather than see her as a monster, is to neuter the black comedy.

The excellent Simon Paisley Day brings menace by the coffin-load to the role of Kath’s equally lecherous brother Ed, with a wonderful nervous snigger when he comes onto Sloane, and Richard Bremmer also does a good job as their seedy and myopic old father.

Horne looks about as sexual in his nerdy clothes and his naff highlights as a bowl of pot-pourri.

But the casting of Mathew Horne is as great a mistake as the direction. Sloane is meant to be drop-dead gorgeous, so that everyone who seems him wants a piece of him, even when they know he’s a psychopath.

It’s deliberately not clear whether he’s gay or straight – he is just an object of universal desire. That gives him a cockiness that drives his character.

But Horne, with fidgety stage inexperience, looks about as sexual in his nerdy clothes and his naff highlights as a bowl of pot-pourri.

His Sloane is nervy and anxious to please, and Ed’s double-take when he sees him for the first time seems utterly misplaced. If this is animal magnetism, the animal in question is a dead sheep.

There’s nothing wrong with exploring character to see if there’s something we haven’t noticed before. But taking the swagger out of Sloane gives him no reason to stay in a house where he has been rumbled from the start as a murderer. It’s meant to be outrageous, not the study of the plight of a poor Barnardo’s boy.

Orton himself was famously bludgeoned to death by his lover three years after Entertaining Mr Sloane was first performed. I couldn’t help wondering why his self-styled admirers have tried to give the play the same treatment.

SIMON'S VERDICT 2/5

Trafalgar Studios, London SW1, until April 11, 0870 060 6632

Would you like to receive news notifications from Daily Express?