Entertaining Mr Sloane

For thirty years after its initial production Joe Orton’s first play was ignored until it’s revival in 2005. Written in 1963 and initially produced in the West End in 1964 solely due to the patronage of Terence Rattigan, the play was considered scandalous and fell out of favour after 10 years or so. A satirisation of what Orton saw to be bigotedness, his work was invariably able to highlight sexual issues by his comically oblique take on them. Maybe that was its downfall. Once sex had been freed from the constraints of the Lord Chamberlain maybe it was thought that Orton had lost his bite.

The most recent attempt to bring it back to London failed when Matthew Horne, playing Sloane, fell ill a couple of months into the run so Paul Kerryson’s revival in Orton’s home town of Leicester has been eagerly anticipated.

One of the innovative things that Curve does is, on in-house productions, to open up the dress rehearsal to paying customers. Thus it was that I found myself on a damp Thursday evening, in a sold out house, watching an evening’s entertainment for just £2. Yes TWO pounds!

Entertaining Mr Sloane is, in 2012, a period piece and having the director drawing our attention before the show to the different laws and mores of the period helped to set the scene. A montage of video and pictures further cemented our view of the period.

As this was the very first time that the cast and crew had aired this production in a full auditorium it was no surprise that they took a while to get into the rhythm of the audience’s reactions. Using just a basic set of one room on the studio theatre’s stage emphasised the claustrophobic feel of circumstances closing in on the characters until the finale when a surprising solution to their problems is sprung.

A cast of just four plays out the surprisingly modern juggling of sexual needs against a background of what we now know was the last vestiges of post war puritanism before society was plunged head first into the swinging sixties and free love. Each of the cast, very experienced stage actors all, play their parts in bringing this story to life and reminding us how much has changed in the last 45 years. Most of it for the better.

© Paul Towers 1/11/2012