Wilde meets Pinter and Viz as Joe Orton’s radical strangeness is laid bare
The last play of Joe Orton’s tragically short career ends with a knob joke: a giant gentleman’s appendage descends from the sky. It’s the perfect end-note for a writer who spent his life sticking up two fingers at notions of propriety; here it takes on a genuinely spiritual quality – like the arrival of the Goddess Hymen at the end of As You Like It.
This meticulously constructed medical farce is equal parts Wilde, Pinter and Viz magazine. When Dr Prentice attempts to ogle a pretty young secretary, his wife’s untimely arrival draws the psychiatrist into a Freudian farrago of cross-dressing, drugs and violence.
As Prentice, comedian-turned-actor Rufus Hound gets top billing, but the TV star is effortlessly upstaged throughout by Jasper Britton’s Dr Rance, a pinstriped authoritarian who is inspecting Dr Prentice’s clinic and gets all the best lines.
This revival in Orton’s home city of Leicester marks 50 years since he was murdered by his lover Kenneth Halliwell, aged just 34. He never lived to see this play staged, but was always adamant his work was “closer to The
Homecoming than I Love Lucy”. He would be pleased with director Nikolai Foster’s chilly staging. In Michael Taylor’s antiseptic orb of a set, the actors are like sexually transmitted bacteria twitching around in a petri dish. Other productions have played Orton entirely for laughs, but Foster brings out his radical strangeness.
Orton’s genius was to take the cosy, conventional English farce and push it beyond breaking point. He runs through a checklist of taboos: incest, sado-masochism, paedophilila, rape. “We may get necrophilia, too, as a sort of bonus,” quips Rance, who also delivers a brilliant rant on the dangers of avant-garde theatre. It’s the sound of a young, gay, self-taught radical from the Midlands tearing apart the straightlaced hypocrisy of the older generation. Until Mar 18. Tickets: 0116 242 3595; curveonline.co.uk