PL AYBILL entertaining mr. sloane
entertaining mr. sloane joe orton }{
a pproxim at e ru n ni ng t im e: 2 hou rs a n d 40 m i nu t es t h er e w ill be one 20 m i nu t e i n t er m ission
TIDBITS
ARTIST NOTE: STUART HUGHES What intrigues and delights me about Entertaining Mr. Sloane is the way it nimbly dances between light and dark. I have never had the pleasure of seeing it performed, but over the years I have read it a number of times, with its mischievous language and puckish phrasing, and it has always made me burst with laughter. Yet existing just under the hilarity is Orton’s very biting observations of the way people behave when they are in denial of their true selves and urges. The four characters, vexed and frustrated by their fears or unanswered cravings, are propelled to act, sometimes foolishly, sometime cruelly, towards those who they perceive to be obstructing them. They flip back and forth between moments of outrageous, farcical behaviour and then flashes of vicious, sinister conduct, and it’s amazing how quickly the tension can get ratcheted up. It’s been a joy watching director Brendan Healy help shed light on the psychological impulses of each of the figures, allowing the real human need to be seen underneath their seemingly outlandish actions. I hope you enjoy this marvellous play. It’s a true pleasure to have the opportunity to work on it. Thank you very much for joining us.
STUART HUGHES, Ed in Entertaining Mr. Sloane
• O rton
trained as an actor at RADA. He never acted professionally but he gave perhaps his greatest acting performance when he was called up for National Service in the British Army. In preparation for the medical exam, he glued on scabs that had fallen off after a recent operation on his appendix, and took up smoking with a vengeance, in order to bring on an asthma attack. During the interview itself he improvised a profound deafness in one ear, which put him over the top and procured the desired discharge.
• J oe Orton and his lover Kenneth Halliwell were
buried together, their ashes mixed in death by request of his agent Peggy Ramsay. It fell to Orton’s sister to do the actual deed. She worried aloud that she was putting “too much Ken and not enough Joe” into the urn. Ramsay delivered a rebuke worthy of Orton himself: “It’s a gesture, dear, not a recipe,” she said.
• I n
1964 in England, all new plays had to pass through the centuries old Lord Chamberlain’s Office for Standards of Decency before they could be produced. To Orton’s vast amusement, Entertaining Mr. Sloane was returned with all of the heterosexual references removed and all the homosexual references left in.