Reviews 2013
Reviews 2013
✭✭✭✭✩
by Joe Orton, directed by Brendan Healy
Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto
July 17-August 24, 2013
Kath: “You can’t see through this dress can you? I been worried for fear of embarrassing you”
Soulpepper completes its survey of Joe Orton’s three best-known full-length plays with a superb production of Entertaining Mr. Sloane. Soulpepper has already staged What the Butler Saw (1969) in 2010 and Loot (1965) in 2009, but Sloane (1964) came first and is the play that made Orton famous, or at least notorious. The production features outstanding performances from the entire cast and keenly insightful direction from Brendan Healy, who is not afraid to bring out the play’s cruelty as well as its humour.
Sloane has echoes of Harold Pinter’s play The Caretaker (1960), in which one of two brothers invites a homeless man into his apartment whereupon the homeless man tries to play one brother against the other in a bid to stay in the apartment. In Sloane, the middle-aged Kath (Fiona Reid) has found the young man Sloane (David Beazley) in a library, and, in sympathy with his tale about his harsh landlady, invites him to lodge with her and Kemp, her aged father (Michael Simpson). Despite all of her affectations of propriety, Kath cannot hide that she is as interested in Sloane as a lover as much as a lodger. Kemp, however, takes an instant dislike to Sloane, believing him to be the man who murdered his employer two years earlier.
Into this fraught atmosphere enters Kath’s brother Ed (Stuart Hughes), a successful businessman, who objects to Kath having any young man living with her lest the tragic events of the past – pregnancy and a baby put up for adoption – be repeated. Ed changes his mind, however, as soon as he claps eyes on Sloane and sees in him a possible sexual conquest. As in The Caretaker, the new arrival plays the two siblings off against each other to see who will offer him the greatest reward, but, this being a comedy, the play has quite a different ending.
Healy stages the play in the round so that from a theatrical point of view, the actors have nowhere to hide. The staging thus underscores the hypocrisy of the characters who hide the truth from each other and themselves as much as they reveal it. After Act 1, Healy has the stagehands shift the stage furniture180º so that everyone in the audience looks on Yannick Larivée’s set from the opposite point of view. This turnabout has not only the practical advantage of giving everyone a full view of the stage but also highlights the turnabout in relations between Sloane and the siblings from passive in Act 1 to aggressive in Acts 2 and 3.
Unlike some directors of the play, Healy realizes that it is essential to the play that Mr. Sloane must have no redeeming features. Sloane in the 2006 Off-Broadway looked like a male model. Here David Beazley looks like a thug with his face in a sneer whenever no one is looking and his body ready for violence at the least provocation. The primary source of the comedy is how Kath and Ed deliberately blind themselves to what Sloane so obviously is in order to fulfill their fantasies of what they wish he were. For Kath he is the replacement for the son she had to give up. She even wants him to call her “Mamma”, blithely unaware of the off-putting Oedipal spin she is giving their sexual relations. For Ed he is an innocent young lad, just like his best buddy Tommy, who he fears could be corrupted by a woman’s influence to give into heterosexual relations. Though Ed and Kath are hardly the models of morality they think they are, what gives the play it’s unusual hint of pathos is that both siblings seek to restore though Mr. Sloane a love they lost in the past.
In a wonderfully comic performance, Fiona Reid makes us laugh at and pity Kath all at once. Her Kath is sensitive and sentimental, but she also longs to have sex with Sloane so much she can barely keep her hands off him all the while warning him that he mustn’t misconstrue her actions. When she allows herself to be discovered in a diaphanous nightgown and fears the clasp may give way, she tells Sloane she blames the manufacturers for their shoddy workmanship. We wonder if she has played at being a scatterbrained woman for so long to attract men that she knows no others way to behave – that is, until at the end when we see she is far more astute than we or the other characters supposed.
Michael Simpson makes Kemp a thoroughly disagreeable figure. He stopped speaking to Ed after he caught him “committing some kind of felony in the bedroom” as a teenager. He shares with Ed and Kath a hatred of dark-skinned people and all the other foreigners now living in England. One of many ironies in the play is that Kemp, who is going blind, is the only one in the family who sees Sloane for what he is.
Orton’s caustic satire of moral hypocrisy has not dimmed in effect over the years. The censorship of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office that Orton worked under meant that he had to find cleverer ways at suggesting what Ed and Kath’s desires really are. Thus, their very prim language is filled with double-entendres of which they are not fully aware. With Healy at the helm, no aspect of Orton’s carefully crafted language goes missing. With the full cast in top form, this wickedly funny play is one you won’t want to miss.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (top) David Beazley and Fiona Reid; (middle) Stuart Hughes. ©2013 Cylla von Tiedemann.
For tickets, visit www.soulpepper.ca.
2013-07-18
Entertaining Mr. Sloane