Theatre review: Entertaining Mr Sloane

Nadia Fall moves from Stratford to Southwark, and launches her time at the Young Vic with Entertaining Mr Sloane, Joe Orton's first full-length play that feels like Pinter played as farce. It's a comparison that Peter McKintosh's design particularly calls to mind: The in-the-round set is surrounded by junk, not just around the stage but hanging perilously over it, reminding us that this twisted version of a 1960s suburban house stands alone in the middle of a scrapheap. Kath (Tamzin Outhwaite) brings back Mr Sloane (Jordan Stephens,) a young man she met in a library and offered to let out the spare room to. When she was very young Kath had a husband and a baby son, and lost both of them; she's decided that the new lodger is going to be a replacement figure for both, and the fact that she tries to seduce him while asking that he call her "mama" isn't the only creepy thing that'll happen while he's there.

Kath's brother Ed (Daniel Cerqueira,) a businessman of incredibly vague wealth and influence, develops his own kind of fixation with Sloane, which largely involves hiring him to drive him around. The all-leather chauffeur outfit is an important part of the contract.

Their elderly father Kemp (Christopher Fairbank) is also fixated with the lodger, but in a darker way: A couple of years ago his boss was murdered, and Kemp caught a glimpse of the killer; he's certain that's the man who's just moved into his house. So everyone in the family has an interest in Sloane, and the power play over whose interpretation of him will win out is the ultimate focus of Fall's production, and presumably a large reason of why she took such a Pinteresque approach.

It's one that has mixed results, and where it falls flattest is in Cerqueira playing Ed as one of Pinter's blandly menacing gangsters. It weirdly takes out the homoeroticism, one of Orton's defining characteristics, leaving Ed fighting over Sloane not because he's shown any kind of desire for him himself, but (perhaps) only as a way to fight and control his sister. It leaves his motives vague and his dressing up of the chauffer as a strange kind of non-sequitur.

It takes Ed out of the picture as one of Orton's figures of ridicule, and with Sloane himself played as enigmatic to the point of being the siblings' puppet, cuts out a lot of the comic grotesquery of the play. So it's lucky that Outhwaite is there to utterly throw herself into the comic horror, stealing the show whether she's in queasily simpering seductive mode or scrabbling around on the floor with a toasting fork to find her missing dentures.

Entertaining Mr Sloane remains entertaining regardless of some odd choices: Some of the proto-Victoria Wood lines of eccentric suburban snobbery are unlikely to ever lose their effect, and Orton's deliberately provocative approach to all matters sexual remain, if anything, more shocking to a modern audience, with the superficially serious approach giving both comedy and shock more of an element of surprise. I do feel like toning down some of the play's extremes misses the point though, and makes some of the more convoluted plot points of the second act drag a bit.

Entertaining Mr Sloane by Joe Orton is booking until the 8th of November at the Young Vic.

Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Ellie Kurttz.