Entertaining Mr Sloane

Joe Orton’s 1964 breakthrough play thrives on these juxtapositions of fake niceness and shocking naughtiness, which is why it hasn’t dated. The carefulness of Peter McKintosh’s design maintains the musty period feel but doesn’t overdo the kitschiness, as that last West End revival did.

Orton’s subversive comedy was always one of cheek and attrition, and Nick Bagnall’s revival, though hampered by the edgy discomfort of Mathew Horne as Mr Sloane, whose lack of stage experience is all too evident, makes merry with period detail while playing the grotesquery of the characters for real.

Staunton’s Kath is a blowzy old boot, for sure, but she’s far more rooted in the sadness of the mother who lost her baby and wants a replacement. Just as the orphan Sloane is a victim of his own underprivileged background, so she is a walking catalogue of dismayed glances and defensive tics. Her diaphanous negligee is the stalking horse for her deeper purpose.

And it’s also very funny in a crazed, slightly worrying way. Kath has picked up Sloane in a library and he becomes a pawn in a struggle for possession with her sinister brother, clearly a refugee from Pinter land in Simon Paisley Day’s elegant, savage performance, a moustachioed habitué of mysterious business meetings on the city outskirts.

The trouble with Horne’s Sloane is that he doesn’t exude the effortless insouciance of the androgynous sex symbol. He looks good, strangely similar to Malcolm McDowell (who played the role at the Royal Court opposite the great Beryl Reid, reprising her film performance) but the devilry is laboured and the chippy charm of his Gavin and Stacey performance is not enough to see him all the way through.

Richard Bremmer plays the old Dada very decrepit indeed, with some slightly misfired opening night business with the toasting fork before he stabs Sloane. But the Kath’s flirtation once Sloane’s trousers are removed is flagrantly done, and there are no punches pulled by Horne and Paisley Day in their misogynist dialogue and the brutal, brittle language is as riveting as ever.

– Michael Coveney