Nympho, Homo, Psycho:  Entertaining Mr Sloane

Notes by Emma Parker, Ph.D., a prominent Orton scholar

Most people who attended the original production of Entertaining Mr Sloane in London, 1964 arrived expecting to be entertained and departed appalled. The first stage play by Joe Orton (1933- 67) – a black comedy about two middle-aged siblings (Kath and Ed) who compete for the attention of an alluring and sexually flexible young lodger (Sloane) – was widely condemned as ‘repulsive’ and ‘sickening’ in its day. Theatre-goers accustomed to genteel drawing room dramas were shocked by Orton’s outrageous combination of the comic and macabre, his influential signature style that gave rise to the term ‘Ortonesque’. The play’s breezy treatment of murder, blackmail and sexual servitude generated affront rather than amusement. Orton didn’t care about the numerous complaints and bad reviews, however. He set out to satirise social conservatism in this comedy of (bad) manners. Delighted to provoke outrage, Orton even submitted to the press letters of protest about his own play under the pseudonym ‘Mrs Edna Welthorpe’.

Despite this impish sense of fun, Orton’s humour was fuelled by anger. As a working class, gay man living in a deeply class-stratified British society prior to the legalisation of homosexuality in 1967, he was keenly aware of social and sexual inequality. Orton grew up in poverty on a deprived Leicester housing estate and declared himself ‘from the gutter’. He had little formal education and began writing plays whilst spending six months in prison for the defacement of library books (a playful protest against ‘rubbishy writing’ he undertook with his partner Kenneth Halliwell). This sentence, wildly disproportionate to their crime, left Orton convinced they were punished for their sexuality rather than damage to civic property.

Sloane forms part of an iconoclastic counterculture that attacked the Establishment in the ‘Swinging Sixties’. Its chief target is middle class aspiration and the bourgeois respectability that made sex outside marriage illegitimate for Kath and same-sex desire impossible for Ed. The play humorously exposes the characters’ self-delusion through subtext and sexual innuendo. A contrast between words and deeds reveals the hypocrisy and vicious amorality that underlies their polite manners and social platitudes.

Once dismissed as a distasteful play about a ‘nympho’, a ‘homo’ and a ‘psycho’, Entertaining Mr Sloane deserves to be acknowledged as a sophisticated satire on social and sexual pretence. It is a psychologically subtle tragi-comedy that counts the cost of conformity – what has to be cast out in order to fit in. As such, the play that established Orton as preeminent postwar dramatist continues to resonate today.

Dr Emma Parker, University of Leicester, UK