July 6, 2010
Adelaide
Theatre

Entertaining Mr Sloane
by Joe Orton
State Theatre Company of South Australia
Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide Festival Centre
July 6. Tickets $ 29 – 59. Bookings : BASS 131 246
Until July 25.

When the famous playwright Terence Rattigan saw Entertaining Mr Sloane in its first season in London in May, 1964, he described it as the best first play he had seen in “thirty odd years”.  The prodigious fluency of Joe Orton’s grim three act farce still impresses, as does his use of the device sometimes referred to as the  Stranger in the House of Order.

Like Moliere’s Tartuffe and Jim Carrey’s Cable Guy, the devious Mr Sloane insinuates himself into the household of brother and sister, Eddy and Kath, and, in exchange for occasional gigolo duties with both, looks forward to a cushy life of idle frolic. The twist – and it is the point of Orton’s satire – is that Sloane, the amoral young psychopath, is no match for the concealed depravity of his apparently respectable captors.

With an excellent cast, and Victoria Lamb’s painstakingly tasteless and down- at- heel drawing room décor (surrounded on every side by an atoll of junk and detritus) State Theatre Company director, Adam Cook’s production reminds us of the influence on Orton of Harold Pinter’s 1958 play, The Birthday Party. If Pinter’s was the comedy of menace, so Orton reveled in the menace of comedy.

The actors understand this and do not flinch. Sean Taylor is excellent as the repressed predator Eddy, and Dennis Olsen astutely moves between old man Steptoe comedy and defiant dread as Kemp, the doomed “Dadda” who, although legally blind, has fatefully seen too much. After a tentative beginning, Renato Fabretti , especially in Act Two when he is kitted out in  black leather and butcher boy cap, transmits a convincingly narcissistic blonde charm as Sloane.

Jacki Weaver, as Kath, is simply outstanding. In a strawberry blonde wig and dressed like an ageing kewpie doll, her performance is expertly pitched and key to the production. Physically and vocally she drives the comedy, but she also has a strangely resolute dignity which, at least in part, repels the play’s misogynist excesses.

And they are many, because, nearly fifty years later, the broad spectrum iconoclasm in the play is not as funny as it used to be. Especially in Act Three, Eddy’s aversion to women is relentless and it is hard to distinguish from the writer’s own suppressed rage. This is a most accomplished production but we are left wondering whether this play is satire mired in its own derision. For all his jokes and comic situations, Joe Orton’s Mr Sloane is much more uncomfortably sinister than he is entertaining.

Murray Bramwell

BRIEF
Entertaining Mr Sloane
by Joe Orton
State Theatre Company of South Australia
Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide Festival Centre
July 6. Tickets $ 29 – 59. Bookings : BASS 131 246
Until July 25.

The prodigious fluency of Joe Orton’s grim three act farce still impresses

as the devious Mr Sloane insinuates himself into the household of brother and sister, Eddy and Kath, and, in exchange for occasional gigolo duties with both, looks forward to a cushy life of idle frolic. The twist – and it is the point of Orton’s satire – is that Sloane, the amoral young psychopath, is no match for the concealed depravity of his apparently respectable captors.

With an excellent cast, and Victoria Lamb’s painstakingly tasteless décor, State Theatre Company director, Adam Cook’s production reminds us of the influence on Orton of Harold Pinter. If Pinter’s was the comedy of menace, so Orton reveled in the menace of comedy.

The actors understand this and do not flinch. Sean Taylor is excellent as the repressed predator Eddy, as is Dennis Olsen as the old man Kemp, and Renato Fabretti, in  black leathers and butcher boy cap, transmits a convincingly narcissistic blonde charm as Sloane.

Jacki Weaver, as Kath, is simply outstanding. In a strawberry blonde wig and dressed like an ageing kewpie doll, her performance is expertly pitched and , at least in part, repels the play’s misogynist excesses. And they are many, because, nearly fifty years later, for all his jokes and comic situations, Joe Orton’s Mr Sloane is much more uncomfortably sinister than he is entertaining.

Murray Bramwell

The Australian, July 8, 2010.