THEATRE
A Police Triumph
By HILARY SPURLING
Joe ORTON deserves attention, not simply as one of our most astute and sophisticated play- wrights, also as a sign or portent of the times. Mr Orton deals with themes still fashionable, though now a trifle dated—brutality, jackboots, rape, perversion, necrophilia, all sorts of kinki- ness behind the sofa and inside the wardrobes of drab suburban homes; he is our best example of the hole-and-corner arty type made good as a West End success. His latest play, Loot, trans- ferred this week amid general applause from the tiny Traverse theatre to the Criterion. His first play, Entertaining Mr Sloane. did the same two years ago, from the Arts to Wyndham's (and thence to Broadway), with the enthusiastic sup- port of Mr Terence Rattigan. Whereupon a cer- tain embarrassment took hold of some of his admirers. Instead of being heartened, as logically they should have been, by this sign of discrimina- tion and good sense from a wider public, they seemed disgruntled and reproachful.
This uneasiness was not, of course, simply a matter of box office success (though that was also felt to be obscurely disreputable). It was a res- . ponse to something in the play itself—a titillating slyness and naughtiness, familiar to West End audiences, the kind of roguishness that makes the man at the Palladium suggest to a dull audience, 'I know, all hold hands and the one at the end of each row put his finger in the light socket.' People who laughed with the same sharp shock of recognition and pleasure at Mr Orton's out- rageous jokes still felt suspicious and unhappy, guilty as though they were taking time off from worthier purposes. Loot is less of a problem— partly because we have grown up a little in the past two years, partly because the play contains a heartfelt attack on the police force. 'It's a theme which less skilfully handled could've given offence,' says someone somewhere in Loot.
Which was precisely what upset the early admirers of Sloane—that it did not give offence, was hailed as a farce and taken as a huge joke, except by a small section of the public which was mortally offended by the subject-matter. Of the two reactions—uneasy reproach and frank moral outrage—the first is the more naïve, all of a piece with the literal approach which takes Peter Brook's US or David Cregan's Three Men for Colverton, or, for that matter, Tennyson's Harold, to be serious plays because they were conceived in what their authors thought was all seriousness. The second is more to the point, for Loot, like its predecessor, like all good comedies in fact, is a seriously offensive play—though here subject- matter is largely incidental. A pair of unscrupu- lous young smoothies, Harold and his friend, Dennis the undertaker, spend a large part of the evening fingering Harold's mother's corpse, dress- ing and undressing it, dislodging its glass eyeballs, examining its underclothes, trying to find some- where to dump it so they can hide the proceeds from a bank robbery in its coffin. Some of this is funny, much of it is tedious and second-hand, a desperate attempt to inject new life into a dead
convention by pushing on towards anything that hasn't yet been tried. In fact, whenever any one is being beaten up on stage, or kicked to death or revealed as an unsuspected murderer, it is a pretty fair sign that Mr Orton has lost the thread, in the interests of cocking a passing snook.
`To seize on the tiniest scrap of reality under the layer of clichés that cover it, we must mobilise considerable inner strength, develop great offensive power and a fierce spirit of in- dependence,' writes Nathalie Sarraute, for whom, as for Mr Orton, this layer of clichés is tonic rather than depressive. Mr Orton thrives on the seeping tide of platitudes, slogans, cheap admass thinking, banality, insincerity, glibness and stupidity in which we live: language is his in- strument. Both plays contain a helpless, inoffen- sive old man who represents all the normal, decent emotions an audience might be expected to feel ('Was your Chapel of Rest defiled?' is McLeavy's first thought, on hearing that robbers have got into the undertakers, 'Human remains weren't outraged?'). who takes everything at face value, believes the best, and is horribly shocked to discover the worst. In Sloane, he is kicked to death, in Loot arrested for a crime he did not commit; in each case, with the connivance and approval of all the other characters. Much of the pleasure comes from watching this innocent vic- tim bullied and browbeaten and savagely punished. In Loot, his chief tormentor is the appalling Inspector Truscott, played with un- earthly brilliance by Michael Bates. In this admirable production, directed by Charles Moro- witz, there are still limp, naturalistic passages, traces of a compromise unresolved in the author's mind. Only Mr Bates—of the whirling eye, the prying hand, the smile suddenly frozen —has the bloodcurdling truthfulness of farce. Truscott takes over the household, with cold insidious questions leading to a fourth degree which brings McLeavy to the verge of break- down, and it is Truscott who finally solves all problems by agreeing, for a share of the loot, to fake the evidence and frame McLeavy. But it is McLeavy who delights in the wreath from the Friends of Bingo, and sincerely believes in the trite formulae they all use—`Would you like to view the deceased for the last time?' Dennis asks him, and 'Don't want a last squint, do you?' says Dennis to Harold in private. McLeavy. in short. is the dupe, hypocrite, simpleton, the honest citizen who, among so much unscrupulous vil- lainy, is really diseased and vicious, and who, according to the harsh laws of comedy, deserves all he gets.
Stated so baldly, the play sounds grim, whereas its overriding impression is one of riotous amia- bility. In part, of course, this is due to Mr Orion's agility with homely techniques of farce— an agility bound to look fishy, when set beside the technical ineptitude of most of our other serious playwrights. More important, his robust,
romantic affection for the crudeness and tinsel vulgarities of English as she is spoken today.
Mr Orton explores a small area of provincial garishness and pretentious dowdiness, a pocket adjacent to Pinter's, with much the same power- ful aesthetic satisfaction we get from the best domestic comedians—Hancock, Kenneth Wil- liams, Al Reed.
Which explains, perhaps, why it seems often more readily accessible to seasoned West End audiences than to the small band of devotees bred on the comparatively meagre diet of the non-commercial theatre. West End audiences, after all, have been used for years. if not for gLnerations, to collect the slightest hints, the merest inflexion of irony, the most delicate nuance of deflation. from a line of English actors who have been traditionally. far in advance, for subtlety and complexity, of their playwrights. A rrime example, last week, of a kind of writing now happily in decline was Anouilh's The Fight- ing Cock. One of the chief problems of modern life, Edmund Wikon is quoted in the programme as saying, is to avoid seeing the plays of Anouilh. Why we should have to put up with them still I cannot think. John Clements and John Standing, and one or two other excellent actors, fight a losing action against the waves of pomposity, sentimentality and inconceivable tedium which in the end they cannot stem.
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