Loot Performance History
Loot by Joe Orton
Theatr Clwyd, 1995
Loot was written between June and October 1964. Two years later it won Joe Orton the Evening Standard Award for best Play of 1966. In between, the struggle to arrive at a definitive text that was acceptable to author, actors and audiences almost made Orton give up writing altogether.
It was originally subtitled ‘a farce’, under the projected title Comedy of Horrors. Kenneth Halliwell, the author’s lover, suggested the title Loot to recall the cosy whodunnits of the thirties while masking the vicious satire that was at its core. The first draft Orton delivered to the producer Michael Codron was top-heavy with talk, and at this stage the character of Fay was dominant while the corrupt policeman Truscott was little more than a supporting player.
Rehearsals began in January 1965 with an all-star cast which included Ian McShane, Geraldine McEwan and Kenneth Williams. Conditions were far from ideal: the director Peter Wood was simultaneously directing The Master Builder at the National while commuting regularly to Broadway to oversee another production. Nevertheless, Orton’s honing of the final script was greatly helped by one Detective Sergeant Challoner, whose doings were currently being gleefully reported in the press. A dogged policeman whose over-enthusiastic pursuit of criminals sometimes led him to stray beyond the strict confines of the law, Challenor gave the playwright just the inspiration he needed to turn the authority figure of Truscott into a savage caricature.
“I think it is very unhealthy for a society to love the police the way the English do. When you have that kind of affection for authority you begin to have the makings of a Police State. I think wariness of the police is a much healthier attitude.”
As the rewrites began to bring out more of Truscott’s unpleasant side, Kenneth Williams began to feel exposed in the part – it was not playing to his strengths and besides, the rest of the cast were growing uneasy about the amount of rewriting that was going on. It was hardly surprising that the opening in Cambridge was a disaster. Orton was concerned there were so few laughs for Truscott, while the reviews simply attacked everything about the play. “A particularly nauseating article,” was how the Cambridge Review described it.
The failure was probably due to a fundamental lack of cohesion between the writing and the acting. Wood had seen it in stylised terms, like a Restoration comedy, trying to find a manner of playing which would reduce the sting when in fact the sting was the point. The set was a dazzling white, art nouveau concoction before which the cast, dressed in black, stood out like letters on a page. It was cold, functional and distanced the audience.
“Unless Loot is directed and acted perfectly seriously the play will fail… Ideally it should be nearer The Homecoming than I Love Lucy. Don’t think I’m a snob about I Love Lucy… but it is primarily aimed at making an audience laugh. And that isn’t the prime aim of Loot.”
After Cambridge it was decided the play needed more plot and better dialogue. The original script was eighty-nine pages long. It ended up with 133 pages of rewrites as Orton valiantly attempted to give Wood what he thought it lacked. “[it] needs to reach in action the same anarchic conclusions of the dialogue,” Wood told him. At Brighton the cast rehearsed the new scenes in the afternoon while performing the original version in the evenings. By Oxford everyone was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Yet still Orton kept the rewrites coming, taking heart from Wilde’s dictum: “Talent is the infinite capacity for taking pains.”
“I do my best work rewriting. What I usually do is cut because I find cutting is the real thing. An awful lot of plays could be made so much more brilliant by cutting only there isn’t anything to cut. If you haven’t got a story and a plot, you can’t cut.”
And his work did eventually begin to pay off. Although the play still shocked little old ladies in Bournemouth, the Manchester Evening News called it “the funniest thing to have hit Manchester since Beyond the Fringe”. But the run finally ended at Wimbledon on 20 March. The cast simply couldn’t face a London transfer, so Loot closed after fifty-six performances.
Its American opening was also put on hold for the time being as Entertaining Mr Sloane had recently flopped on Broadway. Orton was obliged to lick his wounds for a few months until a second production was tried out at the University Theatre, Manchester under Braham Murray. Murray, a rising star who had recently directed the landmark anti-capital punishment revue Hang Down Your Head and Die, even managed to persuade the Lord Chamberlain to reinstate most of the cuts Orton has been forced to make earlier. This time the set was more naturalistic, the whole thing tighter and more controlled. But still the notices were not good enough to see the play into London. First the Royal Court then the National turned it down. Orton declared he was ready to give up the theatre – and then the American director Charles Marowitz decided to mount a new production at the Jeanetta Cochrane Theatre.
He had discovered the secret of Orton’s style: “Orton,” he wrote later, “like Wilde was a master of artificial diction and, unlike Wilde, a master craftsman as well.” Michael Bates played Truscott as a “brainless idiot”, copying certain sergeant majors he had known in the army, while hundreds of lines were cut to bring the jokes and comic business into much sharper relief. This new production opened on 29 September 1966. The Sunday Telegraph hailed it as “the most genuinely quick-witted, pungent and sprightly entertainment by a new young British playwright for a decade”, while Ronald Bryden in the Observer said “it established Orton’s niche in English drama”. Loot transferred to the Criterion on 1 November.
Orton had always felt it was a London play, but still audiences were wary. Then four days after Orton received the Evening Standard Award, the producer’s business manager took him into the auditorium to show him a full house. “We’ve not lost a single customer since the award,” he said. “No one has complained since Wednesday. Now they’ve been told they can enjoy it, they do.”
PS
Can’t remember where I would have got all this. Probably John Lahr’s biography Prick Up Your Ears. Maybe I’d seen Alan Bennett’s film adaptation of the story too, with Gary Oldman reliably brilliant in the title role, but even that would not have made me warm to the man or his work.
The trouble I have with Orton is that he is so relentlessly grubby. There is never much differentiation between the characters, none of them are sympathetic so there’s no one you want to root for, they’re all venal, and they all seem to want the same things – sex and money. All right, maybe he’s right about the last and the rest of us are all hypocrites for pretending we are different, but there is such a thing as social etiquette, and most of us at least have the grace to disguise such urges when in company. Orton insists his action should be played real when it is patently not. No wonder early actors struggled to get the tone right. You can’t play it straight because that’s not how real people behave, and the only way to play comedy properly is to play it straight. Ergo, dissonance, confusion, and disconnect between style and content. There is no way you can make a caricature or a cartoon sound or look ‘real’. Compare any Orton play to any comedy script by Clement and La Frenais and then tell me which is the more truthful, the more valuable a facsimile of life as it is lived.
The Lord Chamberlain at the time described the play as “unpleasant”. Much as it pains me to agree with any kind of unelected government censor, in this instance I can’t help but agree.