a freudian nightmare

As part of London Semester, I'm teaching a British Theatre course. On the evening of Jan. 13, I took the students to their first performance--a production of Joe Orton's Loot at the Tricycle Theatre. I'm glad we picked the students up from their flats to escort them to the theater, because the Tricycle is located in an area of town that may have put the students off had they made their way there on their own. I find Loot hilarious, and I thoroughly enjoyed myself, but I think it may have been too dark and cynical for the students. Still, I believe it was good for them. Many of them had all gone to see Avenue Q the evening before, and so they needed to see something a little less crowd-pleasing. In any case, we had a good discussion of it during the following morning's class, and if nothing else, they seemed to get what Orton was trying to accomplish.

Loot is a fast-paced farce steeped in black humor and satire. Orton takes middle-class British mores and turns them inside out, revealing them to be hollow and threadbare. Orton takes pot-shots at religious piety, reverence for the Royal family, squeamishness over sex, greed, and--most especially--law enforcement. Doon Mackichan was fabulous as Fay, a sexually voracious, avaricious black widow, who hides behind a façade of Catholic respectability, and who gets some of the best lines in the play. (At one point she quips, "I'm a woman. Only half the human race can say that without fear of contradiction.") And David Haig made for a very funny Truscott, a corrupt police inspector, who is by turns as brilliant as Sherlock Holmes and as ridiculous as a Keystone Cop. My favorite of his lines: "Policemen, like red squirrels, must be protected."

The other actors were not as adept. Matt Di Angelo and Javone Prince, who played the young bumbling crooks Hal and Dennis, seemed over their heads, while James McCleavy as the grieving widower delivered a performance that was often very good, but often only serviceable.

If you don't know much about Orton, here's a site devoted to him. Be sure you check out the images of the library books that he and his lover, Kenneth Halliwell, defaced and for which they served six month jail terms.