Review: Entertaining Mr Sloane
Entertaining Mr Sloane by Joe Orton, directed by Simon Phillips. Designed by Shaun Gurton, lighting design by Matt Scott, music by David Chesworth. With Ben Geurens, Bob Hornery, Amanda Muggleton and Richard Piper. Melbourne Theatre Company, Fairfax at the Victorian Arts Centre until February 10.
One of the most famous photographs of Joe Orton sums up his self-consciously louche vulgarity. He is slouched in a deckchair, naked except for a pair of white Y-fronts, smirking ironically at the camera. His immaculately tanned skin glistens, and a single lock of hair curls wantonly over his forehead. But the focus of the photo is his crotch: his legs apart, he is offering his cock for our awed delectation.
Orton was boastful about the dimensions of his penis, but in this particular photograph he is supposed to have stuffed his underpants with toilet paper. This theatrically staged image seems to sum up the flavour of Orton's plays, that sly mixture of self-mockery, frank lust and exaggerated fantasy, leavened with a casual brutality.
What's not so evident in this image is Orton's aesthetic intelligence; the comparisons with Wilde are not entirely unjust. But while Wilde's plays are exquisite machines, the works of a poet, Orton's precision was of another kind. His plays were satires on human animality, casting a sardonic eye on the hypocrisies and cruelties of middle class England. Crucially, as his biographer John Lahr points out, like all great satirists Orton was, first of all, a realist.
It seems to me that this is where Simon Phillips' production of Entertaining Mr Sloane goes dreadfully wrong: right at the beginning. This is a bafflingly bad production, so wrong-headed that it in fact makes nonsense of the play. Phillips takes Orton's disturbingly amoral universe and wraps it in a neat moral. He manages somehow to stage a play about sex without the smallest whiff of real, dangerous lust. Worst of all, he and his cast trample Orton's anarchic comedy into the ground. It's about as funny as a used condom.
Entertaining Mr Sloane, Orton's second play, was his first big hit. Mr Sloane (Ben Geurens) is a sexually charismatic youth who is pursued by both his landlady Kath (Amanda Muggleton) and her wealthy brother Ed (Richard Piper). Kath's father, Kemp (Bob Hornery) remembers Sloane's face as that of the man who murdered his former empoyer. By the end of the play, Sloane has murdered Kemp, and is blackmailed into a "practical" ménage à trois with both the brother and sister.
It's easy to see the spell of Harold Pinter in this early writing - with Samuel Beckett, Pinter was the only contemporary playwright whom Orton respected - and it has strong similarities to plays like The Birthday Party. There's the same focus on human banality, the same pervasive sense of sexual threat. And there is the same quality of edgily heightened realism, a quality Orton always claimed for his work. His plays, he said, were not fantasies: they were accurate portrayals of reality.
Loot, one of the plays that made Orton's reputation, was a disaster on its first outing for reasons that sound very similar to what's wrong here. A peformance of "outrageous mugging" from Kenneth Williams and confused performances from an all-star cast sent it to an early grave. "The play is clearly not written naturalistically," Orton said of Ruffian on the Stair, with the failure of Loot in mind. "But it must be directed and acted with absolute realism...No 'stylisation', no 'camp'. No attempt in fact to match the author's extravagance of dialogue with extravagance of direction."
Certainly, Phillips' production pays no heed to these admonitions. He directs the play as if it is an episode of Are You Being Served? - here are the same stereotypical characters, the same upper-lower-class English accents (with the concomitant laughter at lower-class pretensions), the same broad sexual innuendoes. The effect, predictably, is to terminally deflate every single comic line. I had to come home and read the play again to remind myself that it really is funny.
Perhaps the gesture that sums up the prurience of this production is the difficulty with Ed's smoking. In the script, he is a chain smoker who fetishises his silver cigarette case. Somehow Richard Piper manages to fiddle with cigarettes constantly without ever lighting one. He loses his matches; he takes a cigarette out and replaces it in his silver case; he does everything except actually smoke.
So far as I know, it is not illegal to smoke on stage in Victoria; perhaps the MTC has some sponsorship deal which prevents drug use on stage, or perhaps it simply doesn't want to offend its patrons. But then you wonder why on earth they decided to do this play. Just as this show attempts to show a chain smoker on stage without any actual smoking (despite an important scene where Ed smokes backstage, sinisterly watching the other characters) so we have lots of sexual innuendo - of the eye-popping, crotch-grabbing, bum-slapping kind - without any actual sex.
The performances are bogged down with stage business - the first two pages of dialogue take about 10 minutes - and make the play maybe half an hour longer than it ought to be. People seem to putting on coats and hats and taking them off every two minutes. The leering and winking at the audience seems to go for hours. This sense of everything being muffled by inessential detail is highlighted by Shaun Gurton's over-detailed set, an irritatingly intrusive score by David Chesworth that underlines every "significant" line and a lighting design that, like the production, permits no darkness on the stage.
The actors themselves each seem to be in a different play. There's nothing wrong with Amanda Muggleton's performance as such, aside from the fact that it's utterly wrong for the text. The tragedy that infuses Kath's life is muted into a mere joke, making the misogyny of the other characters both less palpable and less significant. As for Richard Piper: I am not at all certain what he is doing, but it's embarrassing to see such a good actor reduced to such unashamed mugging to the audience, such a meaningless constellation of tics and gestures.
About 20 minutes into the first act, as Mr Sloane (Ben Geurens) lounged unconvincingly on the couch, thrusting up his crotch in an uncomfortable simulacrum of adolescent seduction, an image flashed into my mind. I'm sure it was a photograph of the 1975 production of Entertaining Mr Sloane at the Royal Court, in which Sloane was played by the young Malcolm McDowell. The image of McDowell lounging on the couch showed me what was missing here: a charismatic amorality, a louche, dangerous charm that might, at any second, become threatening.
Geurens plays Sloane with none of the manipulative intelligence or incipient violence the role requires. This has serious ramifications later. When Sloane murders Kemp (Bob Hornery) the scene has no horror or pathos at all: it ought to be frightening. And it distorts the play grievously when it appears that a panicky Sloane - far from manipulating the situation to his satisfaction - has simply been trapped by the wily siblings. As I overheard one audience member say with satisfaction on opening night, Sloane "got what he deserved".
Orton must be spinning in his grave; such neat moralising symbolises everything he was against. The play itself makes no such suggestion. Sloane isn't punished at all. He uses his sexual power to literally get away with murder and to worm himself into a situation of considerable material comfort. And, aside from Kemp, no character in the play has any principles: each of them is prepared to do anything to ensure his or her own gratification.
Perhaps it's the ugliness of the characters in this play, their single-minded pursuit of their own gratification, which makes people flinch. Whatever it is, perhaps it's a tribute to Orton's continuing radicalness that his work must be so castrated before it can appear on stage. But it's a huge disappointment, all the same. One day, I'd like to see the play that Joe Orton actually wrote.
