|
 |
Entertaining Mr Sloane Director: Geoff Brittain Theatre Guild, Season closed  Director
Geoff Brittain provides in the program a couple of good reasons why
not to stage this play; the boorish and sexually unconventional characters
have long-lost their shock value and it's dated to irrelevancy. The
excuses for going on with the show were nostalgia and to instruct
the kids in how wonderful the '60s were. Well, that's a bit like showing
people that handguns are dangerous by shooting them. Joe Orton's own life was far more interesting that Mr Sloane's and is a major contributor to his notoriety. After pumping out five plays in the last three years of his life, Orton's male lover of 16 years nailed him with a hammer in a jealous rage and then overdosed on laced grapefruit juice. Orton was only 34 - now there's the stuff of a play! In 'Entertaining Mr Sloane', Orton draws a triangle of love and sexual favours betwixt a young and hunky boarder, his sexually needy and psychotic landlady and her pretentious and phony brother - all unceasingly self-centred. The siblings' father, lurks about the house and his demise is the catalyst for the denouement. The actors, Ben Brooker, Tony Busch, Lindy LeCornu and Bill Ramsay, all supplied oversize and overly eager characterizations yet didn't have their feet on the ground. A considerable challenge in performing their roles is that each character is concealing something, making them difficult to fathom - it's a fine line between a character's bad conceit and poor acting. Further, the play is merely an incident in the characters' lives - the co-conspirators at the end of the play are exactly the same as they were in the beginning - nothing's changed. There is no revelation of truth or personal transformation, no search for answers or newfound sense of humanity - they are blind to anything but their own needs from beginning to end without insight to their self or others. In short, nothing of consequence happens. And the star of the show is...the set! An Honorary Research Fellow in Orthopaedics & Dentistry at the University of Adelaide by day and a set designer by night, Ole Wiebkin re-created the 1960s interior of a type of cheap post-war council house that were constructed overnight in the fringes of big English cities. The set comprised a crowded surfeit of dated furniture and gewgaws (his lovely word, not mine) backed upstage by walls of patterned wallpaper that fade into transparency. Upstairs, the old man's room is subdued by a screen while outside, a forest of electricity poles is suggested. A nice touch was the fairy lights on the couch. This is one of the best sets I have seen in the Little Theatre and matches some of Peter Goers' masterpieces from way-back. Bravo! Director Geoff Brittain knew the play would be a hard sell, so he extended the black comedy into farce by having the characters mime Brill hits from the '60s which had some thematic connection to the action of the moment. While this device was amusing and successful, it combined with superfluous dialogue to stretch the concert to just under three hours. The play doesn't have the ingredients to be iconic and should be hit on the head with a hammer. Not entertaining any more, Mr Sloane.  |
|
The latest issue available now!     |
All content copyright dB Magazine