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.
ENTERTAINING MR. SLOANE
CREATIVE TEAM
CAS T David Beazely
Sloane
Stuart Hughes
Ed
Fiona Reid
Kath
Michael Simpson
Kemp
Production Brendan Healy
Director
Yannik Larivée Set & Costume Designer
Kimberly Purtell
Lighting Designer
Richard Feren
Sound Designer
Simon Fon
Fight Director
Diane Pitblado
Dialect Coach
Nancy Dryden
Production Stage Manager
Ashlyn Ireland
Assistant Stage Manager
SOULPEPPER PRODUC T ION Jacqueline Robertson-Cull
Cutter
Erika Connor
Stitcher
Head of Hair & Makeup Wardrobe Coordinator
Geoff Hughes
Ilana Harendorf
Isidra Cruz
Dresser
Greg Chambers
Props Builder
Tracy Taylor Props Buyer
Lisa Summers
Scenic Painter
Barbara Nowakowski
First Hand
Entertaining Mr. Sloane is presented by special arrangement with Samuel French, Inc. The video and/or audio recording of this performance by any means whatsoever are strictly prohibited. i l l u s t rat ion : b r i a n r e a
BACKGROUND NOTES
E
ntertaining Mr. Sloane made Joe Orton a star. It premiered in 1964, and from the very beginning it inspired passionate opinions. Some, like established British playwright Terrence Rattigan, adored it: “the most exciting and stimulating first play that I’ve seen in 30-odd years...” Others, including the first reviewers, loathed the play: “A slice of life as its most bestial” was a typical response. Still, the show was a great success: co-winner of the Best New British Play Award in Variety’s London Critics Poll. When the production transferred to the West End, the Daily Telegraph grudgingly amended their notice: “while shameless and repulsive... I was held throughout.”
What held that unwilling critic, and more favourably inclined audiences since then, is the ballsy, buoyant way that Orton speaks the unspeakable, his unswerving commitment to naming familiar hypocrisies. His genius is that no matter how outrageous the situation, he always finds the laugh. If the shock has faded with time, this elegantly constructed, rough-edged farce still hits the mark in its examination of the ways people lose themselves in petty selfish concerns, the way they follow societal rules that stifle and warp them. The characters here struggle heroically: Kath with her middle class pretensions and insistent longings, Ed with his vigorous self-denial and yearning for connection, Sloane with his need to be adored and his past, which is never far away. Orton knows the cruelty that lurks just below the rosy surface of respectability and he exposes it with a swaggering relish. Sloane is Orton’s first play and the influence of Harold Pinter can be detected, but there’s already something original in the mayhem and omnivorous sexuality, something that would later have its own word: “ortonesque” – meaning both grotesque and savagely funny.
joyously gay in a time when most were closeted. He adored and enjoyed all kinds of men and yet spent his entire adult life in an intimate and deeply connected relationship with Kenneth Halliwell. His brief, brilliant career produced some of the greatest farces of the last century. In Sloane the rage, ferocious intelligence and anarchic spirit that made Orton such a standout writer are on offer. Dig in.•
biography John ( Joe) Orton was born in Leicester in 1933. After high school he made several half-hearted – and unsuccessful – attempts to hold a job. In full flight from the tortures of indentured servitude – also known as ordinary life – he entered RADA, the prestigious British drama school, where he met Kenneth Halliwell, to whom he remained profoundly connected all his life. On graduation, the would-be novelists scraped by in a cramped studio flat. For amusement, they took out library books, defaced them (often pornographically) and tore out the pictures to decorate their home. They were finally arrested and sentenced to six months in separate prisons. When Orton emerged he began to write plays. The first, Entertaining Mr. Sloane, became an award-winning, runaway hit. The next, Loot, was a spectacular flop. Only slightly daunted, Orton licked his wounds and re-wrote. The second incarnation won the Evening Standard Award for Best New Play. In 1967, he completed his masterwork, What the Butler Saw, and wrote a film for The Beatles, which was rejected. That August, he was murdered by Halliwell who then took his own life. In 2008, the city of Leicester created Joe Orton Square in his honour.
Joe Orton wrote contradictory characters because he lived the contradictions himself. In his teens he was “semi-literate” and less than 20 years later he was referred to as the Oscar Wilde of the Welfare State. At 30, he was a failed novelist just out of prison (for defacing library books). Two years later he was the toast of London. He was openly,
Tidbits and Background Notes by Paula Wing
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