Writer: Joe Orton
Director: Nadia Fall
Apart from a couple of scenes, Nadia Fall turns Joe Orton’s classic comedy into a more serious play, emphasised by the stunning set of hanging pieces of furniture that gestures towards the claustrophobic trappings of postwar domesticity. Fall’s is an interesting approach, but without the focus on Orton’s innuendos and smutty jokes, this revival makes for a long, slightly clinical evening.
Before it was first performed in 1964, the Lord Chamberlain returned Entertaining Mr Sloane with the censorious marks of a blue pencil. Orton was not surprised that certain words of his were deemed unfit for audiences, but was delighted that the lines to be cut were mainly references to heterosexual sex. Some of the queer allusions had apparently flown under the censor’s radar.
And perhaps they have flown under Fall’s radar as well: lines such as Sloane’s come-on to Eddie, “I like a plunge now and then’ or Eddie’s cheeky insinuation, “I wish I could give you one, boy. I wish I could” are delivered matter-of-factly without any raised eyebrows. And so, everything seems a little flat and empty and, for a while, it does seem that Sloane and Eddie are merely talking about sport and cars when really they are talking about sex.
Fortunately, Fall retains the grotesque humour at the end of Act One, where Kath seduces the young son-like Sloane. It’s a funny scene with the audience gleefully horrified at Kath’s crude, yet somehow innocent, remarks. Tamzin Outhwaite is almost unrecognisable as Kath, the 41-year-old who knows little about sex, and possibly has only had sex once before, resulting in an illegitimate baby. But she’s not completely clueless; she knows that the fastening on her robe will soon come undone, and Outhwaite cleverly manages these contradictions in Kath’s character. And under Fall’s direction, she makes Kath more human than ever.
Sloane usually appears at Kath’s door as if he has wandered off Carnaby Street, an embodiment of the gender fluid Swinging 60s that has somehow bypassed Kath’s home, located in the middle of a rubbish dump, entirely. Yet, in Jordan Stephens’s hands, Sloane is another near-innocent, a pragmatic chancer rather than a cunning trickster. Stephens seems like no threat at all; Kath and Eddie appear to nurture his bad behaviour, easily turning him into the puppet that he eventually becomes.
Daniel Cerqueira and Christopher Fairbank offer solid support as Eddie and the Steptoe-like Kemp, but this is Outhwaite’s play, utterly terrifying as she scrabbles on the floor to retrieve her dentures. But in between these gross scenes, the action flags and long conversations are stripped of tension and intrigue. The drabness of domesticity is captured perfectly in Peter McKintosh’s set staged in the round, but after the interval, Sloane comes on to dance to a pumped-up version of Kylie Minogue’s Slow, suggesting, maybe, that he has links to a newer kind of gay man. However, this idea is never repeated and therefore comes across as an anachronistic gimmick rather than any comment on the history of queer lives.
“Entertain Mr Sloane”, Kath tells her father as she goes off stage. But her request falls on deaf ears.
Runs until 8 November 2025
