Entertaining Mr Sloane

Perth Concert Hall

NEIL COOPER

★★★

ON the surface, barely anything is made explicit in Joe Orton’s dark 1960s comedy of psycho-sexual menace. Every panting innuendo between Sloane’s amoral cuckoo-inthe-nest and the middle-aged brother and sister he flits coldly between, however, promises to spill over from Sunday tabloid mundanity into something unutterably bigger.

Now half a century old, Orton’s first full-length play teased the Lord Chamberlain, then in charge of what could and couldn’t be said onstage, with a taboo-busting mix of contemporary pop buzzwords and stylised baroque. This ages well in London Classic Theatre’s touring revival, which arrived at Perth Festival for a one-night stand on Monday night, setting out its store on a jumble of upside-down brass bed-posts and awkwardly angled wardrobes hiding a multitude of sins.

Into this mess steps Paul Sandys’ sexually ambivalent Sloane, a psychopathic piece of rough trade who manages to wrap both his landlady Kath and her gangster brother Ed around his undoubtedly smooth little finger.

As Sloane becomes both plaything and parasite, only Ed and Kath’s father, Kemp, can see the manipulative malevolence behind the good looks.

Michael Cabot’s production captures the full sense of post-war repression and shabbily absurd aspirationalism that courses through the play. Every grotesque nuance is wrung from the script by Sandys, with Jonathan Ashley’s Ed, Pauline Whitaker’s Kath and Nicholas Gasson’s Kemp all sufficiently larger than life to have stepped out of the sort of post-modern sit-com which Orton’s small canon can now be seen to have predicted. Audiences can see for themselves when the production stops off in Kirkcaldy tonight and tomorrow before finishing with a dirty weekend in Musselburgh.