Theatre
Tributaries
Kenneth Hurren
Loot by Joe Orton (Royal Court Theatre)
Oh Coward! devised by Roderick,: Cook from the words and music of Noel Coward (Criterion) 1,1t's just possible that the late Joe Orton could solve the Royal Court's immediate financial problems single-handed. The theatre may not be having any luck with its beggingbowl at the doors of the Arts Council (only E20,000 is needed to save the Theatre Upstairs for the nation), but the JO Festival is shaping up pretty profitably, and I hope the English Stage Company is in for a nice piece of the action on the West End transfers. Entertaining Mr Sloane, which kicked off this curious act of homage, is now at the Duke of York's following a sell-out six-week run at the Court (which, at £4,000 a week, must have more than cleared the production costs). What the Butler Saw, which some say is the pick of Orton, is on the stocks for July, and perhaps by then Loot, too will have moved into the commercial sector where the gravy is. I'm bound to say, though, that I have a reservation or two on the question of whether it deserves to.
It seems to me that they are taking Loot altogether too seriously down in Sloane Square. Not that they can't see that the play is funny — it does, in fact, hold up a great deal more confidently than 'Mr Sloane' as a funny play in its own right, rather than as 'simply a parodial comment on the fashionable black comedy of the mid'sixties — but unabashed trivia is rather out of their line, and they do seem strangely inhibited about giving the piece some farcical zip. The direction by Albert Finney might easily seem a touch ponderous if applied even to Brecht; in a work that requires the kind of frenzied desperation more usually associated with the exploits of Brian Rix, it is apt to allow the more sensitive auditor altogether too much opportunity to ponder the whimsical tastelessness of it all, to say nothing of the flamboyant crudity of its prejudices. That, of course, may be the idea.
Orton's anarchic irreverence is lavished here upon the solemnities of death (if you have lately lost a dear one, honestly, I should give it a miss), and the play is set in a bereaved Catholic household, mostly around the coffin of the deceased Mrs McLeavy as arrangements are made for the funeral. The coffin, as it happens, does not actually contain the remains of Mrs McLeavy; she is dead all right, but she has been wrapped up and stashed away in a cupboard by her son, a laconic young rascal who has had the idea of using the coffin as a hiding-place for the proceeds of a recent bank robbery in which he has been involved. This crime, among others, is being investigated with transparent incompetence by one Truscott of the Yard, celebrated, he claims, for his arrest of the Limbless Girl Killer. "Who would want to murder a limbless girl?" he is asked, and has patiently to explain that she was the killer. .
Orton's dialogue is full of such unexpected amusements, and at the verbal level the ,play is always an outrageous delight. The cast here deal expertly with its quaint incongruities, although Jill Bennett is perhaps rather severe as the dead woman's nurse. I suspect she is trying to establish some reasonable equation between the woman's seductive behaviour and her revealed reputation as a murderess, whereas Orton himself had a fairly casual approach to such conventional consistencies and it is best, on the whole, to go along with his cheerful whims. Miss Bennett, like Finney, is perhaps looking for more significance in him than was ever there. He was never really acute; he was just cute.
Roderick Cook's Oh Coward!, a miniature tribute to the late Sir Noel, was bound to suffer by comparison with the more elaborate Cowardy Custard of a few years ago, and in the event, I'm afraid, it suffers quite a lot. Cook, who is also a third of the cast and is given to occasional rather embarrassing 'attempts to impersonate Coward's own style of delivery, has crammed about fifty items into an hour and a half, caring not how cruelly some Of them are abbreviated. My only pleasure was Geraldine McEwan, her style, her impishness, her elegance, and every one of her carefully flattened notes.
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