Wicked Original

By Stefan Kanfer

Farce is tragedy out for a good time. Its characters miss disaster by a pulsebeat (What if the husband had peeked behind the door? What if the policeman had knocked a minute earlier?). Its situations are improbabilities made tantalizingly possible.

Like many ancient crafts, pure farce disappeared long ago; it was replaced by the machine-tooled "sitcom" or by crude, graffiti-black comedy. But British Playwright Joe Orton was not a man to ride a trend. In the '60s he wrote a cycle of extravagant farces, most of them failures on and off Broadway. Orton would not bow to the times, but circumstances eventually bent to him. His last play, What the Butler Saw, is now an off-Broadway smash. The American stage production of Entertaining Mr. Sloane lasted only 13 performances; the film version is a savagely witty success. True, the play's surroundings have been cinematically expanded, and a better cast lends the characters fresh distinction and intensity. Yet for the most part it is not the work that has altered but the audience, which has seen too many real excesses to be shocked by audacious fictions.

Mr. Sloane (Peter McEnery) is a blond thug cursed with bisexual charm. In the Satyricon, he would have been one of the boys in Fellini's band. Still, if one cannot have pre-Christian Rome, contemporary London will do. Sunning himself in a graveyard one afternoon, Sloane is taken in--in every sense--by Kath (Beryl Reid). She is a bloated harpy who will never need silicone or estrogen. Enter two gentlemen who provide complications and multiply laughter. Kath's father Dadda (Alan Webb) is a senescent buzzard; her brother Ed (Harry Andrews) is a lantern-jawed caricature of muscle-bound Christianity.

Both men take a quick interest in Sloane, Dadda because he recognizes the youth as a wanted murderer, Ed because he likes manly young fellows --preferably draped in leather goods. Kath and Ed engage in a game of sexual cricket, with Sloane as the wicket. As is always the case with such games, it is the bystander who suffers. Dadda ends as a mummy, done in during a Sloane tantrum. The outcome is bigamy, accompanied by rituals that ridicule marriage, family, religion, sex and death.

Murderously Funny. Orton aimed to outrage, but he also calculated to delight. His dialogue is wickedly original and his vision manages to combine the commonplace and the diabolic. It is as if by loosening a floorboard one could look down at flames. No author could demand a more empathetic director than Douglas Hickox, who understands the Ortonic core: the road to hell is paved with good inventions. The whole cast performs with ease; the kinkier the farce, the straighter their faces. Their achievement is that most difficult feat: a funny murder made murderously funny.

Three years ago an eerie footnote was added to Entertaining Mr. Sloane. A young writer who delighted in mocking violence was found in his London flat beaten to death by his roommate --who later committed suicide. Joe Orton, who was 34 at his death, could have written the scene. Instead, he experienced it.

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