Entertaining Mr Sloane

Description

Entertaining Mr Sloane was first staged in 1964. Despite its success in performance, and being hailed by Sir Terence Rattigan as 'the best first play' he'd seen in 'thirty odd years', it was not until the London production of Loot in 1966 - less than a year before Joe Orton's untimely death - that theatre audiences and critics began to more fully appreciate the originality of Orton's elegant, alarming and hilarious writing. Introduced by John Lahr, the author of Orton's biography Prick up Your Ears, Entertaining Mr Sloane is now established as an essential part of the repertoire of the modern theatre.

Joe Orton (1933-1967) was an English playwright noted for his black comedies, which combine genteel dialogue with violent and shocking action. Orton left home at 16 to train as an actor. His subversive style of humour first revealed itself in a bizarre incident in 1962, when he and his lover, Kenneth Halliwell were jailed for defacing library books. The two had carefully removed jacket blurbs from middle-brow novels and substituted their own, mostly scatological, counterfeits. Orton delighted in shocking audiences by breaking taboos surrounding sexuality and death in conventionally structured 'black' farces involving epigrammatic dialogue and frenetic, convoluted plots. Thus, in Entertaining Mr Sloane (1964), a young lodger attempts to lure a woman and her brother into providing him with all he needs, only to find he has become each one's sexual plaything; Loot (1965) is a parody of a detective story involving much comic business with a coffin and a corpse; and What the Butler Saw (1969) stylishly turns farce on its head. Orton was a homosexual in a period before the liberalization of British law, and this side of his life is described in detail in his posthumously published diaries. He was battered to death by Halliwell (who subsequently committed suicide) during a domestic argument at their home in Islington, North London.

'This is a play that has dated no more than The Importance of Being Earnest.' * Benedict Nightingale, The Times, 31.1.09 * 'Forty-five years after its London premiere, Joe Orton's Entertaining Mr Sloane comes up almost as fresh as a four-leaf clover. If there has been a funnier British comedy since Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, I cannot recall it.' * Nicholas de Jongh, Evening Standrad, 2.2.09 * 'Entertaining Mr Sloane retains its power to provoke and startle. It is a truly amoral piece, wild, witty and utterly heartless.' * Charles Spencer, Daily Telegraph, 2.2.09 * 'The play's language, with its sly double entendres and surreal subversiveness, remains distinctive, crying out for liberation from the restrictive social context of its original creation.' * Robert Shore, Metro (London), 3.2.09 *