Review: Entertaining Mr Sloane

Entertaining Mr Sloane
Everyman, Cork
***

Joe Orton's vicious farce of 1964 has always posed problems, given its mixture of racism, misogyny, homophobia, nymphomania, class hysteria and manic comedy.

In this brew the only straightforward character is young Mr Sloane himself, a sexual godsend to his landlady, a looming menace to her father, and an enticing bit of rough to her hard-shelled brother.

While all around him are tottering through attitudes seemingly pulled at will from the toxic social fashion of their day, Mr Sloane changes colour like the welfare state foundling he claims to be, yet remains utterly himself, a catastrophe in leather trousers.

The play’s problem lies with the contradictions of pace, atmosphere and character within what might be called the plot if one were feeling generous. Orton’s work carries a certain dissolute glamour, and audiences generally have been generous – the response to this London Classic Theatre production is no exception.

The problem remains, however. Director Michael Cabot has chosen to allow those inherent contradictions to slither along through the dialogue, with the result that many of them are almost lost in the challenge of phrasing, which merges camp, kitsch and grandiloquence without mercy. The cast have to be up for this; Paul Sandys plays Sloane as if his sexual duplicity and murderous potential could be pulled out of his trouser pockets at any given moment, while a high-pitched Pauline Whitaker offers a cross between Jocasta and Sybil Fawlty as his voracious land-lady.

Both serve Orton as well as they can, but the playwright’s intentions may be best interpreted by Simon Kenny’s set.

For a house languishing on a rubbish dump, Kenny makes Orton's metaphor more dangerous by accumulating the innards of a discarded street in piles of lumber teetering above the playing area, poised to collapse upon the occupants and turn their lives to debris. Touring nationally