✭✭✭✭✩
<b>by Joe Orton, directed by Jim Warren
Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto
August 1, 2009</b><b>
</b>
Before he was murdered at in 1967 at the age of 34, Joe Orton had written only nine plays, but these are enough to suggest that he is the closest English comedy has come to a second Oscar Wilde. The wit of both is based on a continual contradiction of expectations and for both the object of that wit is respectability and unthinking obedience to society’s rules. Soulpepper’s production of <i>Loot</i> (1965), though still set in the 1960s, proves to be surprisingly contemporary in its critique of unbridled authority.
In <i>Loot</i> Orton takes the structure of farce and turns it to his own ends. Mrs. McLeavy is dead and in her coffin, as her caretaker Fay (Nicole Underhay) comforts the bereaved husband (Oliver Dennis), clearly planning with every thrust of bum and bosom to make Mr. McLeavy her eighth husband, the previous seven having mysteriously died. Meanwhile, McLeavy’s son Hal (Matthew Edison) and his friend the undertaker Dennis (Jonathan Watton) decide that the best way to hide the loot they’ve stolen is to put it in the coffin in place of Mrs. McLeavy. This plot device is symbolic since here, as in Wilde, money more than love or death arouses the characters’ strongest emotions. Things are going badly enough when police detective Truscott (Michael Hanrahan) enters disguised as an inspector for the Municipal Water Board.
The various outrages done to the corpse of the late Mrs. McLeavy may have shocked the play’s original audience, but director Jim Warren knows that self-important authority figures are still frightening and funny today. Truscott exclaims, “Under any other political system I'd have you on the floor in tears!” as he bludgeons Hal who is on the floor in tears. Hanrahan’s portrait of officiousness run amok is a sublime combination of idiocy and superciliousness. Oliver Dennis is his equal on the other side, evincing a desire to obey and be respectable to the point of absurdity. It is their interaction that really drives the show. Underhay is a treat as a nurse who is as outwardly a devout Catholic as she is brazenly amoral. Watton catches just the right note as the bisexual ruffian Dennis, but Edison’s unsuccessfully effeminate Hal seems rather at sea about his character, most likely because Warren downplays Hal’s and Dennis’s relationship. Warren paces the show as a gradual crescendo of increasingly absurd protestations. As Truscott tells Fay, “When I make out my report I shall say you've given me a confession. It could prejudice your case if I have to forge one.”
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2009-06-22.
Photo: Nicole Underhay, Matthew Edison and Jonathan Watton. ©Cylla von Tiedemann.
<b>2009-06-22</b>
<b>Loot</b>