Loot - Park Theatre, London
Joe Orton was a writer who
dared to speak the unspeakable. He pushed the boundaries of common taste and decency.
He tackled subjects others would find repulsive and flaunted the hard facts of
everyday life to the masses; facts that people would prefer to sweep under the
carpet. If mankind possessed any basic human values, they were thrown away; all
classes were corruptible. Moralistic attitudes were daydreams. People in real
life don’t have morals; they just try to persuade themselves that they do. They
flagrantly despatch messages from their soap boxes of what is right and what is
wrong, how we should live a good clean holy life and then they renege on their
ramblings with their actions.
Actions speak louder than
words. You may scoff at the above, but the character Fay in Loot shows this
with great aplomb. She sits with her rosary in hand, proclamations coming thick
and fast about how the family should behave with respect in front of the dead,
yet it becomes clear she has abused her capacity as nurse to the dying to
ensure that she, not family, will benefit under the Will of the dead. But it is
not just Fay who is a dubious character, all parties are corruptible on one
level or another, and they don’t care who they cast to the lions.
Life’s a bitch and then you
die.
Orton's characters depict
life as what it really is, a vicious but strangely funny world. People spend
their days doing what they need to do to survive; if they are not cheating death,
they are dealing with it, and in the case of Loot, with laughter at the core.
Two of Orton’s best known
plays are Loot and What the Butler Saw. In both of these he showed his mastery
of the art of black comedy. His tongue in cheek approach allowed him to show in
all seriousness the disintegration of society amongst us.
"In a world run by fools, the writer can only chronicle the doings of fools or their victims. And because the world is a cruel and heartless place, he will be accused of not taking his subject seriously...But laughter is a serious business, and comedy a weapon more dangerous than tragedy. Which is why tyrants treat it with caution. The actual material of tragedy is equally viable in comedy - unless you happen to be writing in English, when the question of taste occurs. The English are the most tasteless nation on earth, which is why they set such store by it."
Joe Orton
Orton was born in Leicester
1st January 1933, the first of four children in an ordinary working class
family. He was semi-illiterate, missing a lot of school due to his asthma, but
he had a passion for reading and amateur dramatics. Following speech lessons to
remove his lisp, he was accepted at RADA, where he met his future friend and
lover Kenneth Halliwell.
Halliwell was the opposite
of Orton. He had a promising academic career ahead of him, but he preferred to pursue
the lure of the theatre. Neither did particularly well at RADA but Halliwell
had a longing to become a writer, and he wanted Orton to become a writer too.
They lived an isolated life together in a bedsit in Islington, decorated with
illustrations they had stolen from library books. They were unsuccessful as
writers, and sought their revenge by doctoring library books that they thought
were rubbish. They cut captions from photographs and posted them against other
pictures. They glued a picture of a Gorilla's head on the cover of Collins Book
of Roses, and then they returned the books to the library. These actions caused
both parties to be charged with malicious damage; both receiving jail sentences
for their misdemeanours. (The writer Jake Arnott created a Radio 3 drama, The Visa Affair, starring Russell Tovey and Tom Burke, based on their experiences. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07y9qyd )
The emergence of Mr Sloan.
Prison changed both parties.
Halliwell became more withdrawn whereas Orton took the opportunity to use his
new understanding of the society that he lived in to write his plays. He saw what
lay under the superficial nature of society. Buoyed on by the success of his
BBC radio drama Ruffian on the Stair, he wrote his first full length play,
Entertaining Mr Sloan. It depicted the 60's as a ruthless time, where nothing
stood in the pursuit of personal happiness, and how drugs and music had impacted
on society.
Sir Terence Rattigan
proclaimed that Entertaining Mr Sloan was the best "first" play he
had seen in years, he praised the use of language and the construction of the
play, but it was not a sentiment shared by everyone and so when Sloan transferred
to the West End, the press joined forces with public condemnation of the play
stating it was "dirty highbrow." Orton, himself helped to encourage
further outbursts by posing under the pseudonym Edna Welthorpe to write to the
Daily Telegraph letters page, "I
myself was nauseated by this endless parade of mental and physical perversion."
Orton knew the limitations
of his first play and started working on Loot – a play which would take its
revenge on the Catholic Church, British law and enforcement and how money is at
the root of all evil.
Two young friends, Harold
and Dennis, take advantage of their current situation (one works in an
undertakers and there is a bank next door) to rob a bank. They burrow between
the undertakers and the bank, storing rubble in the empty coffins, and then realise
they need to find somewhere to stash the contents of the robbery. Harold’s
mother has died, and as the law is beginning to bear down on the two thieves, they
decide the occupied coffin is the best place to safely store their ill-gotten
gains. Add to the mix a gold digging nurse, a grieving widower and a psychopathic
policeman; you have the contents of a hilarious farce awaiting you.
Loot was a completely new entity
for the British Stage. It mixed together the elements of a classic farce with
dubious morals, designed to both shock and delight in equal measure. Despite it
having an all-star cast (Kenneth Williams, Geraldine McEwan, Ian McShane and
Duncan Macrae) the director found it hard to mix the brutal nature of the text
with the open levity of the situation. Orton was asked to re-write the text a
number of times, so the performers never knew from one day to the next what were
expected from them. The play was a complete flop and closed within a
month.
“Loot is a serious play.
Unless Loot is directed and acted perfectly seriously the play will fail.”
Joe Orton’s words were
finally taken on-board and Loot re-opened on the 27th September 1966 and
become an overwhelming success. It won the Evening Standard award and Play and
Players Award for the best play of the year, despite the success, Orton was
still not happy. “Ideally it should be nearer The Homecoming rather than I Love Lucy.” He
insisted that the prime aim of Loot was NOT to make the audience laugh. It was
a play about police corruption, the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church and how to
deal with human remains. “If you’re absolutely practical – and I hope
I am – a coffin is a box. One calls it a coffin and once you’ve called it a
coffin it immediately now has all sorts of associations.”
50 years after the brutal
murder of Joe Orton by his lover Kenneth Halliwell, Loot has returned to the Park
Theatre stage back in its original format. (The Lord Chamberlain had put a
number of restrictions on the play before it could be performed on its 1966
West End debut, mainly due to its immorality!) The play starts with a radio
playing in the background. Sadly, because of the noise of the audience
chattering away, I missed a lot of it, but I caught snatches of a Joe Orton
interview, and what sounded like Mary Whitehouse’s condemnation of society!
It was a joy to watch what
Joe Orton had actually written, not a sterilised version of his thoughts and
ideas of the time. It was brave of director Michael Fentiman to take the risk,
but I think the risk has worked. Homosexuality was illegal when Orton wrote
Loot, but times have changed and audiences are not as easily shocked as they
once were. It’s difficult to understand that phrases such as “the wreaths are
blown to buggery” were removed for the sensitive nature of 60’s audiences, when
we read conflicting reports of how “open-minded” the sixties were!
Fentiman’s direction takes
on board Orton’s desire for the play to be acted seriously. Sinead Matthews, as
the gold digging nurse Fay, has some of the best lines in the entire script,
but she says them with such solemnity that you can’t help but laugh out loud at
her open hypocrisy.
Fay:
She (his dead wife) had a deceitful nature. That much is clear. We mustn’t let
it happen again. I’ll sort out some well-meaning young woman. Bring her here.
Introduce you. I can visualise her – medium height, slim, fair hair. A regular
visitor to some place of worship. And an ex-member of the League of Mary.
McLeavy:
Someone like yourself?
Fay:
Exactly. Realise your potential. Marry at once.
This is the success of a
great writer. The laughter comes from what he has written, not slapstick physical
comedy, or played for laughs on stage which would have Joe Orton turning in his
grave.
Sam Frenchum and Calvin
Demba embrace the ludicrous situation they have dropped themselves in as the
would be crooks Harold (Hal) and Dennis. They have an endearing charm that you
laugh along with, but there is a serious message hidden within, you can’t trust
anyone when money is involved. This brings me to the naïve, grieving McLeavy.
Ian Redford is perfectly believable as the widower, being torn and manipulated
by all those around him, how his early words come back to bite him (re the
police.)“They’re a fine body of men.
Doing their jobs under impossible circumstances.”
If I did have one criticism
to levy it would be Christopher Fulford’s take on the corrupt Truscott. He was
a little too “shouty,” more of a caricature than a character. This stood out particularly
because everyone else played their roles down, which ironically led to the amount
of laughter the play received. That said, I think Orton would be pleased with
this quick-witted production. If you’re going to celebrate the 50th anniversary
of someone’s bludgeoning to death, then a good dose of macabre laughter is the
greatest form of medicine!
Loot runs at The Park
Theatre London until 24th September, and then it transfers to The
Watermill Theatre, nr Newbury, 28th September to 21st October 2017.
Playtext available from Methuan Drama https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/loot-9780413451804/
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