'Entertaining Mr Sloane' review — this eye-popping production brings the bad boy of the London stage back home

Read our review of Entertaining Mr Sloane, starring Tamzin Outhwaite and Jordan Stephens, now in performances at the Young Vic to 8 November.

Summary

• New Young Vic artistic director Nadia Fall revives Joe Orton's shocking farce
• Rizzle Kicks star Jordan Stephens makes a terrific stage debut as Sloane
• Tamzin Outhwaite also impresses as a predatory landlady who sets her sights on Sloane

Nadia Fall sets out her stall as the new artistic director of the Young Vic with a take-no-prisoners revival of Entertaining Mr Sloane, the play which put that theatrical renegade Joe Orton on the map in 1964.

Six decades on, the four-hander hasn’t lost its power to sting, at least as staged in the round on a fascinating set by Peter McKintosh that relegates the memorabilia of the characters’ lives (a crib, chairs etc.) to an aerial collage suspended above the action. The discarded furniture tallies with the shared neglect felt in different ways by the characters, whose worlds have in their own way been upended.

At ground level, you watch with near-voyeuristic fascination as the mysterious, magnetic young Sloane (Jordan Stephens, the Rizzle Kicks star making a terrific stage debut), arrives to take up residency in the home of the blowsy Kath (Tamzin Outhwaite), a 41-year-old who sees this stranger’s arrival as a chance to kickstart her life.

Wafting into view accompanied by the sound of the 1950s song “Softly Softly”, Outhwaite’s Kath turns out to be a hard-bitten widow who has, as they say, been around the block. Possessed of what Kath terms “an upbringing a nun would envy”, she’s a lippy, shrewd sexual predator who finds her match in her own brother, Ed (Daniel Cerqueira), the two before long laying separate claim to Sloane. The object of their competing affections comes with a guile of his own, a manchild with a none-too-clean past whose unbridled physicality would fit right in with today’s club culture – as various (unscripted) visual interludes in the production make clear.

Completing the quartet is the siblings’ enfeebled, near-blind father, Kemp, to whom Christopher Fairbanks brings a rodent-like creepiness, not least when this ageing bigot lets rip with some unpleasant remarks that tally, sadly, with certain corners of society today.

The orphaned Sloane is at once a replacement for the child Kath has lost and the bedmate she yearns to have, and Stephens projects a naïf adrift in the world one minute, an incipient thug the next: kudos to the fledgling stage performer for dropping to the floor to do a workout that should keep him match fit throughout the run. The cast across the board mines the dark humour of the piece, while hinting at a “depraved” (the script’s word) landscape beyond – a psychological deep state with which that hapless genius, Orton, was well acquainted.

One of the British theatre’s undersung treasures, Outhwaite suggests a woman struggling against the odds to survive: more than once, Kath’s false teeth come flying out, which rather puts paid to her come-hither allure. You wince as she reels from the remarks of a cruelly patronising brother (she’s reduced at one point to a household appliance), and one is aware of the influence throughout of Pinter’s The Birthday Party, an earlier play about a landlady that also tilts over time towards menace.

Cerqueira is equally adroit as a suited hardman who recognises in Sloane a darkness equivalent to his own, which surely makes this smooth-bodied male siren that much more desirable: small wonder Eddie talks of having Sloane “on tap at all hours”.

Some of the language (“titties”) sits oddly with modern-day sensibilities, not that Orton, of course, would give a fig about that. Fall lets the text fall where it will, all the while charting a keen-eyed path through period material, pointing up affinities here and there to the present. “Prepare to raise your eyebrows,” Ed tells Sloane when reporting news of Kath’s onetime child. That’s good advice for an eye-popping production that brings this vaunted bad boy of the London stage back home.

Entertaining Mr Sloane is at the Young Vic to 8 November. Book Entertaining Mr Sloane tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Photo credit: Entertaining Mr Sloane (Photos by Ellie Kurttz)