There’s something quite subversive about Nadia Fall kicking off her tenure as Young Vic artistic director with Joe Orton’s debut play, a black comedy from 1964 full of twisted games of sex and class which tells the story of a young lodger being pulled between his sex-starved landlady and her closeted brother. Orton’s nose for our baser natures and the unrelenting rhythm of his dialogue helped to rip away the masks of primness and false civility that he saw in the country around him, and the play outraged some critics as much as it delighted others.
Plenty to chew on in today’s world then - sexuality and prudishness, violence and hypocrisy - and it’s even got a stage debut from Rizzle Kicks’s Jordan Stephens. Some great, truth-telling modern revival? Well no. The trouble is, the play isn’t outrageous, not in Fall’s production. Lines that should be dripping with menace are thrown away like passing the time of day. Vicious, innuendo-laden jokes are swallowed, the sex reduced to seaside postcard levels of cheekiness.
It looks great: Peter McKintosh’s design has antique junk hanging from the ceiling, prams and bedsteads and other tossed furniture, all painted black, as if the weight of antiquated, Victorian morals are looming over this outrageous modern play. Except this production makes the play part of that antique display hanging above it, stiff and creaking and unsure of itself, rather than a brazen reaction to it.
Tamzin Outhwaite and Daniel Cerqueira are decent as brother and sister Kath and Ed, each vying for the attention and body of young and sexy new lodger Mr Sloane. Outhwaite in a pinched floral dress, pinny and kitten heels brilliantly captures the kind of Stepford Wives act that Kath thinks she must perform in civilised society, and then tosses it away when her Oedipal love for Sloane gets the better of her. Sometimes he’s a surrogate son, sometimes a surrogate husband; it’s all a bit messed up, and Outhwaite makes the twistedness work.
Smart-suited Ed, meanwhile, with his leather fetish and mysterious job involving men, conferences and hotels that has made him rich, is another brilliant mess of a character. Cerqueira puts in a very precise performance, wincing as if in discomfort at his repressed sexuality, his softly-softly approach to seducing Sloane a contrast to Kath’s more direct methods.
But it’s a play of endless fathoms made deep as a puddle here. Stephens can’t tune into the rhythm of the constant whip of dialogue, sticking to genial, staccato delivery which turns him into something of a blank canvas. His wry grin suggests, maybe, some calculating quality, but his motives are mostly unclear and this is a play all about motive. You simply don’t believe it when he knocks up his landlady or viciously beats up Kath and Ed’s ailing dad (Christopher Fairbank).
When Kath pops out her false teeth and goes down on Sloane while insisting she’s his new mum, the place should be zinging with the twisted, Ancient Greek charge of it. Instead, it feels a bit like elevated Carry On. Moments which have Sloane bathed in neon green light or dancing to pumping music try to bring a modern tinge, but don’t really add anything at all.
Fall seems to assume the best intentions of the characters. Everyone here is simply too nice, even at their nastiest. Stephens’s Sloane is too breezy, Outhwaite’s Kath too sweet, Cerqueira’s Ed just a bit lost. Without the malevolence all that’s left is the comedy, and even that struggles to break through the stiffness. Turned into a slightly flat period piece, it’s a Mr Sloane that’s entertaining, but not much more.
Until 8 Nov at the Young Vic
