Does it count as chosen family if you’ve murdered and blackmailed it into being? In Joe Orton’s 1964 treacle-dark comedy, greed and desire form a nasty compact.
Sloane – no first name – is sizing up Kath’s spare room. Jordan Stephens (of hip-hop duo Rizzle Kicks) gives the mysterious stranger a bold, open smile, and Tamzin Outhwaite’s Kath blinks like a moth to flame. “You have the air of lost wealth,” she breathes, running what she insists is a motherly leg up his calf. She’s soon straddling him on the chaise (“I shall be so ashamed in the morning”), and when brother Ed arrives it’s clear Sloane will similarly wriggle like an eel into his affections.
Orton’s first full-length play announced a distinctive voice: highly polished speech and murky behaviour. Orton, who cut a swathe through the public conveniences of north London, knew that sex was the body’s unbeatable trump card. His dialogue is a tightrope of propriety quivering above the lewd, every step an innuendo.
Set designer Peter McKintosh’s in-the-round stage is a neat circle of chintz lapped by filth. Above hangs a collage of coal-black domestic objects (pram, cot, birdcage), a happy family home blown apart. Nadia Fall’s production lets characters perch on their seats for just seconds at a time – it looks cosy, but stays unsettled.
This rancorous biological family (with Christopher Fairbank’s querulous old Dadda, like an unkempt gerbil) conceals a sump of misery, especially for Kath, whom Outhwaite makes at once ditsy and shrewd. Daniel Cerqueira’s Ed, a lubricious tongue poking between his teeth, is all bite and bluster: “Your youth pleads for leniency and by God I’m going to give it.”
What does Sloane want? He’s a ruthless chancer, but also a young man adrift, and Fall sharply keeps both in play. Stepping off stage, Stephens stands in dank green light, his limbs grown heavy. He may work his tighty-whities and leathers as Kath’s baby and Ed’s good boy – but is he lost to himself?
Six decades on, Orton’s play shows its age: drum-tight, then increasingly chasing its tail. But Fall’s opening show as artistic director of the Young Vic grins with the worst of human behaviour – and that never grows old.
• At Young Vic theatre, London, until 8 November
