Too few laughs in Orton classic

Entertaining Mr Sloane, Oldham COliseum, to Saturday
LONDON Classic Theatre brought a rather good production of Pinter’s moody “Betrayal” to the Coliseum last year, and now returns with a playwright artistic director Michael Cabot considers a suitable bedfellow for the Nobel prizewinner.

I’m not sure I or many others would agree Pinter and Orton share many similarities, but the two had a healthy respect for each other (Pinter even gave an address at Orton’s funeral) and in some ways use similar devices - precision with words, disconcerting jumps from calm to anger and violence, moments of comedy amid despair, and so on.

Orton’s work is an acquired taste, like Pinter’s, but one a little harder to admire. In this production Cabot pushes the work more than usual towards the tragic side of what he calls the fine line between tragedy and comedy.

The result offers some laughs, but perhaps not enough, and also exposes the flaws in what was Orton’s short but first full-length work — its scrappiness, lack of character development, its prejudices and the overall air that while it might still have the power to shock some people, those people will generally watch nothing more disturbing than “Midsommer Murders”.

Though Cabot doesn’t particularly push the comedy he does get mostly rounded performances from his cast of four.

Pauline Whittaker plays Kath as an overtly randy woman in her early Forties whose age, false teeth and unattractiveness play up warmly to the advances of the young psychopath of lodger-then-lover Sloane (determinedly performed by Paul Sandys, as intense and decidedly petulant, bordering on violent). Nicholas Gasson, though perhaps not frail enough, is admirable as the failing Kemp, father to Kath and Ed. The one discordant note is perhaps the Ed of Jonathan Ashley, played loud and aggressive, in a way that makes some of his actions a little out of the character Orton wrote.

The setting — in a house surrounded by a rubbish dump — gives designer Simon Kenny the chance to make the front room set out of piled-up junk and furniture which works surprisingly well. A little more comedy and a little less tragedy and this would be a much stronger production of the 50-year-old classic.