Jordan Stephens, Daniel Cerqueira and Tamzin Outhwaite. Photo by Ellie Kurttz.

Entertaining Mr Sloane by Joe Orton – Young Vic, London

Joe Orton’s 1964 play is revived, 60 years on, in a production by Young Vic artistic director Nadia Fall. She stages in in the round, on a carpeted living room podium surrounded by a tidal wave of detritus, which also hangs above the stage. Orton sets the play in a house perched beside a rubbish dump, and in Peter McKintosh’s set this consists of abandoned prams, furniture, buckets – the remains of collapsed domesticity. The play is a farce gone badly wrong, highly confrontational and very controversial when first staged. Over the years, it’s meaning has changed significantly. Orton was writing the thin veneer of respectability that hid the unmentionable lives of queer people, and a swell of sexual desires that were not acknowledged. Now, these elements of the play seems less remarkable than the social assumptions that are unwittingly revealed. Passing references to sexual predation in children’s homes and scout troupes, casual racism and the staggering sexism which drives the evening’s climax are somewhat jaw dropping. There’s a distinct sense that this play is no longer what we imagined it to be.

The cast play Orton’s scabrous dialogue with a slightly strangled formality which emphasises the sense that we are spying on a very different time. Tamzin Outhwaite is compelling as Kath, equal parts calculating and naïve in her pursuit of the new, sexy lodger Sloane (Jordan Stephens). This is Stephens (Rizzle Kicks) first professional stage role and, although he is enjoyably self-satisfied he lacks the air of menace that is essential to the role. Sloane has to appear a threat, who could destroy everyone around him, but he seems more a passive object of lust for Kath and her brother Ed, played by Daniel Cerqueira with a deliciously upright campness. His failure to conceal his excitement when he first encounters Sloane, asking him “Do you wear… leather?” is very funny. Their elderly father, Kemp (Christopher Fairbank) is impressively dilapidated and seedy, like Eric Sykes if bitter experience had displaced his sense of humour.

The first act is a highly entertaining competition between brother and sister for the same man. It’s the second half when things start to fall apart. Entertaining Mr Sloane bears a resemblance to Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming, staged in 2023 at the Young Vic on a similarly furnished set. A disruptor arrives in an apparently settled household, opens up the cracks and realigns the sexual relations. However, Pinter is a much more subtle writer, implying but rarely confirming what’s going on beneath the surface. Orton makes everything very explicit, which provides diminishing returns. Pulling this off requires more comic energy than this production can muster. The final scenes, where Orton has Ed and Sloane brutally humiliate Kathy, come across as nasty rather than subversive. Although she gets her comeback, the verbal and physical violence is unpleasantly one-sided. Orton seems to be enjoying himself, which makes for very uncomfortable viewing. The audience is left with a sense that this revival reveals the flaws in the play, and that it’s time may have passed.