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If Jacobean playwright John Webster saw, as TS Eliot so pithily put it, “the skull beneath the skin”, Joe Orton surely spied the teeth behind the smile. His merciless comedies landed like Molotov cocktails on the British stage in the 1960s, brutally exposing the double standards, cruelty and self-interest that swirl around supposedly polite society and ripping away the mask of civility. His brand of scathing cynicism certainly seems ripe for revival right now.
So it’s great to see Nadia Fall launch her tenure of the Young Vic with Entertaining Mr Sloane, a bleak black comedy that, when it premiered in 1964, left one critic complaining that he felt “as if snakes had been writhing around my feet”. It’s a play that combines the unflinching gaze of a Greek tragedy with the sleazy comic tone of a dirty seaside postcard. There’s a pinch of Pinter to its cruel power struggles and a touch of Beckett to its set-up, in which frustrated landlady Kath lives with her decrepit old dad Kemp in chintzy suburban drabness on the edge of a rubbish dump.
Fall’s production starts strikingly. Peter McKintosh’s set floats the carpeted living room in a sea of domestic detritus, with the sad trappings of a life — pram, high-chair, coffin — suspended overhead like dark shadows. The staging crackles with comedy as Kath, all pert propriety in Tamzin Outhwaite’s excellent performance, shows the muscular young Mr Sloane — a potential lodger she has somehow managed to ensnare in the library — around the house. Jordan Stephens’ Sloane smiles beatifically as she simpers and scampers about, babbling on about her “sheltered life” while stuffing armfuls of underwear into a piano stool and subjecting him to what she insists are “motherly” embraces.
But Kath is not the only one who fancies a piece of the enigmatic Mr Sloane. Daniel Cerqueira, as her uptight and controlling brother Ed, literally licks his lips as he describes the leather uniform in which he envisages the young man working for him; Christopher Fairbank’s Kemp, meanwhile, spies something else in Sloane, snarling as he accuses him of killing his former employer. Soon Sloane, now kitted out in tight leather, is playing the besotted siblings off against one another — only to have the tables turned on him in Orton’s final twist.
Outhwaite is superb throughout: there’s a desperate edge to her efforts at seduction and a piteous sadness to the humiliating spectacle of her scrabbling for her dentures, posing coyly in a négligée or pleading with her bullying, misogynist brother (who, we learn, forced her to give up a child for adoption). The cruelties of the swinging Sixties are all too clear, and Sloane’s brief interludes of silent expressive movement suggest he represents a much-needed change.
But Orton’s precise, heightened style is hard to sustain, and the show begins to dip in the second half as the situation becomes ever darker and more extreme. There’s not quite enough menace to Stephens’ Sloane, not quite enough danger in the air. By the end, it’s lost some momentum and becomes hard work. Even so, it’s good to have Orton’s unique brand of scalding honesty back on the stage.
★★★☆☆
To November 8, youngvic.org