Entertaining Mr. Sloane: a play with teeth

Prick up your ears!

Now on stage at Germinal Stage Denver is Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr. Sloane. Orton is that bad boy of 1960s British theatre who shocked and scandalized the British public with Loot and What the Butler Saw.

At first “Mr. Sloane” seemed it might be a black comedy. It’s dark all right – but the only funny thing in the show is Pamela Clifton’s brilliant and inimitable comic reading of the delusional landlady, Kath.

There is no performer in town who can carry off this kind of low comedy with such hilarious brio as Clifton. Her seduction of Sloane, while wearing a diaphanous black nightie, is priceless. Clifton’s aura of humor infuses her character with a brilliant sardonic underpinning. Her personal gift for highlights the cynical honesty playwright Orton lends Kath’s crass vulgarity. A singularly strong performance by Augustus Truhn as Ed, Kath’s sexually repressed brother, solidly anchors the production.

Truhn commands the stage in a fashionable suit. Seth Palmer Harris’s Sloane communicates bratty delinquency, cavalier sluttishness and vacuous narcissism better than any actor in memory. The color of his coif is that of the yellow cake seen on some Betty Crocker cake mix boxes.

Harris is quite striking whether in whitie-tighties with his legs in the air or posing idly in head-to-toe Carnaby Street leather. His charming and cunning Sloane is a profligate wastrel (essentially a good-looking mannequin with homicidal tendencies) who is manipulating Kath and Ed as much as they are manipulating him.

We get that the double-dealing youth of Britian, exploited by both the lower and upper classes, have a special treat reserved for them – and their DaDa, too. The pathetically and dismally correct DaDa is Randy Diamond – father of Kath and Ed. One might describe his whimpering decrepitude as tragedy in shoes. Sallie Diamond’s costume for this elderly character speaks volumes. The mismatched gardening outfit, complete with hedge clippers that dangle dangerously close to his crotch, let us know from the start that his fate will be rotten awful. His savaging by Mr. Sloane is enabled not only by the smarmy lust of Kath, but by the haughty and repressed homosexuality and exaggerated moral significance of her brother Ed.

Mr. Sloane, observing the disregard of morality in both cases, is able to play one against the other and have his proverbial bread buttered on both sides. He can now have his homicidal habit enabled by the two of them as well. The play jabs at the judicial system and many of the other facets of that sullied diadem Orton saw as “that great whore, society.”

The play is set in what one might think of as a respectable English living room. It is impossible for director Stephen R. Kramer, having studied under Baierlein for all these years, to not have fallen heir to the Maestro’s command of all things theatre. His casting is impeccable. His method is both studied and disciplined.

See if you can’t find a scene in Entertaining Mr. Sloane that is a self-fulfilling prophecy of the way Orton would die at the hands of his lover. Orton’s play caused quite a stir at its opening – a theatrical scandal non-pareil. Entertaining Mr. Sloane was a bit like its cousin, Edward Bond’s Saved – which changed the censorship laws in Britain forever.

Orton’s play has teeth and guts. Go see it.