ENTERTAINING MR. SLOANE by Joe Orton (Soulpepper). At the Young Centre (50 Tank House Lane). Runs in rep to August 17 see schedule at soulpepper.ca. $51-$68, some rush. 416-866-8666. See listing. Rating: NNNN
Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr. Sloane may not shock the way it did at its premiere half a century ago, but director Brendan Healy’s production for Soulpepper still demonstrates the script’s savage, comic power.
Orton – whose brief, comet-like career gave audiences some of the darkest theatrical laughs of the last century – sets up an unusual menage a trois in order to look at social conventions, loneliness and suppressed desire.
The needy Kath (Fiona Reid), living with her aged father, Kemp (Michael Simpson), invites the mysterious, first-nameless title character (David Beazely) to be a lodger – and maybe more – in her home. At first her brother, Ed (Stuart Hughes), worries about his sister’s reputation, but when he meets the sexy Sloane, he’s less against the idea of the younger man being around.
Orton provides lots of off-the-wall humour in the way both siblings make plays for Sloane. Kath sees herself as a maternal figure for the smooth-skinned lad, while Ed employs him as a chauffeur, complete with big leather boots, and regularly comments on Sloane’s athletic body and abilities.
Sloane knows how to work them both, becoming whatever they want him to be so that he gets his way.
Yet the playwright also gives the characters a sympathetic underpinning. They’re all forlorn and deprived in some way, even the scheming Sloane, who Healy has strutting suggestively around the central playing area at the start of the play.
Beazely’s chameleon-like performance suits the cagey Sloane, who alternates between swagger, obedience, threats, innocence and telling manipulatively melodramatic tales of his past. An expert at reading people and suiting their needs, he’s a survivor with a troubled history.
The only thing that Beazely lacks is Sloane’s feral quality. In his violent moments he’s more blunt than dangerously unpredictable the latter would make Sloane a scarier figure.
Reid, expert at creating characters the audience can both laugh at and care about, makes Kath a childless wannabe mother whose interest in her new boy is sometimes more lascivious than maternal. Mixed in with her sexual interest is a shyness and uncertainty, so she’s physically raging one moment, coyly withdrawing the next.
Though Kemp is the least developed of the characters, Simpson turns him into a sometimes pitiable figure, estranged from his son and jealous of his daughter’s interest in another man. Truculent toward Sloane, Kemp finally realizes that they’ve met previously, which leads to the play’s climax.
Hughes, in a strikingly different performance from anything else I’ve seen him do, defines Ed as a fastidious, suave, slightly oily and self-impressed man, swept up by his immediate infatuation with Sloane but never able to embrace it head-on.
His wrists may be slightly loose, but this misogynistic Ed, warning his employee off women’s seductive charms, thinks of a footstool and not a homosexual when he hears the word “poof.” He’d certainly never apply the word to himself.
Entertaining Mr. Sloane was Orton’s first play, and he was still learning his stagecraft. The interactions and confrontations could be tighter, and sometimes a point is needlessly made several times.
But this Sloane is biting, funny and, yes, entertaining.
