Joe Orton’s breakthrough play Entertaining Mr Sloane hasn’t been revived in London in almost 20 years, and on this showing you can kind of see why. His dark comedy about a middle aged brother and sister who both fall for a sexy lodger with a shady past caused outrage in its day. But in 2025 it’s unforgivably tame and unfunny.
Or at least it is in this production from incoming Young Vic artistic director Nadia Fall. Despite the hot-pink posters and the presence of Jordan ‘the guy out of Rizzle Kicks’ Stephens in the title role, Fall’s take feels both wilfully dated – very much a ’60s period piece – and pointedly unfunny, trading the menacing comedy associated with Orton (‘dark farce’ is the usual term) for drab naturalism.
Tamzin Outhwaite is the best thing here as horny-but-tragic Kath. Yes, she throws herself at Stephens’s Sloane in cartoonish fashion. But someone has to get the party started, frankly, and besides she does a great job of portraying how damaged and desolate Kath is – her every pass at Sloane feels like a twisted gesture of love directed at her dead son. In fact her performance comes as close as anything to justifying the naturalistic route of the production – a major criticism of Orton is that his works now play as misogynistic, and Outhwaite’s take does a pretty good job in thoughtfully engaging with the trope of the bored, middle-aged woman, while also still being funny.
Elsewhere, though, and Daniel Cerqueira does such a convincing job of playing her brother Ed as a pathologically dreary man that his infatuation with Sloane is barely discernible, and certainly not in any way milked for laughs.
Stephens is solid in the sense you wouldn't think ‘that guy’s not an actor’, but neither does he have the range or nuance to salvage the show, which a genuinely very, very good actor might have done. He lacks menace, and largely plays Sloane as a sexed-up naïf who has accidentally fallen into something bordering a life of crime. He kind of goes along with Ed’s infatuation, but only very chastely – this is certainly about as hetero a take on Orton as you’re ever likely to get.
Christopher Fairbank does a solid job as Kath and Ed’s racist, rodenty, very elderly father Kemp, but his exact role feels confusing now that the play’s not really being treated as a comedy.
And there’s the thing. My best guess as to why Fall has taken such a dreary approach to a farce that once ripped a hole in the moral fabric of post-war Britain is that she has sought to nullify Orton’s more questionable humour. But… it’s a comedy! That’s just what it is! It’s painful hearing punchline after punchline not treated as such. And it all feels so un-outrageous: Britain has become exponentially more liberal since Mr Sloane premiered, but I’m not sure the answer is to tame the whole thing down and not even bother trying to provoke us at all.
Fall’s in-the-round production isn’t entirely retro. Stephens’s leather daddy second-half garb doesn’t seem period accurate. There is a dumbshow sequence soundtracked by Kylie’s ‘Slow’ (the Chemical Brothers remix if I’m not mistaken). Peter McKintosh’s exploded interior set is nifty – a chaotic cascade of furniture and lights – but then most of it retracts into the ceiling before the show starts. But a bit of window dressing doesn’t change the show’s fundamentals.
Fall’s debut season looks promising overall, and indeed in just a week’s time the excellent recent Edinburgh Fringe hit Ohio will transfer to the smaller Maria studio to play in tandem with Mr Sloane. So let’s not start freaking out. But this is a weak start to Fall’s tenure, and perhaps worse, it feels like a rare, flubbed opportunity to bring Orton into the twenty-first century fold.
