Does is it still shock? Thirty-seven years after its première, at this same theatre, does Joe Orton's play retain its primal kick? On the evidence of Terry Johnson's coolly farcical production, emphatically yes: partly because we are more alert now to the play's misogynist cruelty and partly because of the glittering contrast between style and content.
Coldly considered, the action is unremittingly sordid. Sloane, a murderous, bisexual thug, insinuates himself into the home, and bed, of the sexually infantile Kath while also attracting her gaily butch brother Ed. He impregnates Kath, excites Ed by working as his leather-clad chauffeur, and then kicks their father to death. But the exploiter turns victim when Ed and Kath blackmail him into becoming their shared sexual slave.
What makes the play shocking, and funny, is the formal decorum of Orton's language. Harold Hobson, in his original review, compared the play to Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey; and it is the Janeite contrast between Gothic substance and elevated style that gives the play its charge. When Kath famously says, "Until I was 15, I was more familiar with Africa than my own body", or when Ed claims that it is his "liberal principles" that have led him to be foolishly protective, we are in a world where language is used as an elaborate masquerade.
But the virtue of Johnson's production is that it exposes Orton's genuine heartlessness; and it does this by heightening its farcical quality. When Kath vamps the willing Sloane, she appears from behind swagged curtains to a Mario Lanza record like a downmarket Cleopatra; and when Sloane attacks her in the final scene, her dentures go flying across the room, only to be caught by Ed.
Even if Kath is finally triumphant, there is no escaping the rancid misogyny behind Ed's line to his sister that "You showed him the gate of hell every night."
Johnson, in short, brings out the play's cold-hearted swagger. He is helped by a wonderfully over-the-top William Dudley set that, with its murky mural of swirling bodies, reminds one of the collage that decorated Orton's own room. And the performances tread a fine line between verbal comedy and physical farce. Alison Steadman as Kath veers superbly between an affected gentility and a rank coarseness when the chips, and the trousers, are down. Clive Francis as Ed almost salivates at the prospect of a uniformed Sloane and captures exactly a certain kind of blazered, gay muscularity, and Neil Stuke's Sloane is a ruthless blond predator who always sits with legs conveniently splayed.
In the end, I find something slightly chilling about Orton's own amorality. But there is no denying his power as a comic stylist or the play's ability to leave one pleasurably shocked.
Until April 6.
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