Sloane
Sloane is a young man from the lower-middle class who is opportunistic when it comes to sexual encounters. He arrives at the home of Kath and her father to rent a room, but by the end of Act II, he accidentally kills Kemp. Sloane ends up as a rotating sexual partner for the manipulative siblings, Ed and Kath, spending six months with each. He is attractive, lacks morals, and is self-serving, with a tendency toward aggression and potential violence. Although not well-educated, Sloane possesses significant street smarts, enabling him to manipulate almost any situation to benefit himself. The play concludes with Sloane either achieving his greatest triumph or experiencing his deepest failure, depending on one's interpretation of the final scene. According to Lahr in Prick up Your Ears, Orton "saw himself as the physical prototype for Sloane," with the most telling detail being Sloane's "delicate skin," which Orton himself was notably proud of.
Characters Discussed
Kathy (Kath)
Kathy (Kath), a dowdy Englishwoman in early middle age. An outwardly respectable symbol of bourgeois life and values, Kath is a woman with an illegitimate child in her past. She lives with her father in a small home, and her passion for the young lodger she takes in forms one of the play’s central story lines. Although she makes frequent protestations regarding her own morality and honor, she is at heart selfish and easily able to rationalize her less-than-respectable actions. This attitude typifies the play’s portrait of the British middle class.
Mr. Sloane
Mr. Sloane, an attractive, ruthless, and utterly amoral young man. Sloane is the catalyst for the play’s action, arriving as a lodger in Kath’s home in the opening scene and establishing volatile relationships with each of the other characters. Although his background is mysterious and probably criminal, he clearly is a member of the working class and, therefore, an intruder in the social norm of Kath’s household. A figure of menace and violence throughout the play, Sloane appears to be an avaricious manipulator, successfully exploiting the other characters’ weaknesses for his own ends. The story’s conclusion finds him caught in a trap of his own device.
Ed (Eddie)
Ed (Eddie), Kath’s selfish, bullying brother. Ed is a pompous, greedy hypocrite with a keen interest in young men. He is trying to take control of his father’s finances when the play opens. His initial misgivings over his sister’s new lodger vanish when Sloane appears agreeable to Ed’s broad hints of a close future relationship. Ed, more than any of the play’s other characters, makes a constant show of outward concern for notions of morality and social convention, yet he, like Sloane and Kath, is thoroughly unscrupulous in matters of self-interest.
Kemp (Dadda)
Kemp (Dadda), Kath and Ed’s father, an elderly pensioner. Kemp is the play’s true victim, an old man saddled with two greedy children and a vicious young intruder whose presence eventually leads to Kemp’s death. From the time of their first meeting, Kemp sees the menace that Sloane represents, but his son’s and daughter’s shared attraction to the young man leaves him at Sloane’s mercy. His death at Sloane’s hands provides the means by which Kath and Ed finally are able to trap Sloane into doing their bidding.
Ed
Ed competes with his sister Kath to become Sloane's sexual partner, ultimately ending up sharing him with her. Ed is mean-spirited, self-absorbed, arrogant, and controlling. He is the son of the elderly Kemp and is involved in the mysterious "business" that employs Sloane as a...
(This entire section contains 181 words.)
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chauffeur after Ed becomes sexually attracted to him. In his youth, Ed was heavily involved in sports, which his father admired. However, a rift developed between Ed and his father shortly after Ed's seventeenth birthday, when Kemp discovered Ed engaged in something unspeakable in his bedroom.
Now, Ed and his father are barely on speaking terms. In the first act, Ed arrives to obtain Kemp's signature, likely on documents that would place his father in a retirement home similar to the one where playwright Orton's own father, William Orton, eventually lived. When Kemp is accidentally killed by Sloane at the end of Act II, Ed shows no remorse and, throughout Act III, seems solely focused on maintaining his sexual relationship with Sloane. Of all the characters, Ed displays the most hypocritical concern for high moral values.
Other Characters
Dadda
Refer to Kemp
Eddie
Refer to Ed
Kath
Kath vies with her brother Ed for Sloane's sexual attention. She is a dowdy, middle-aged woman with a voracious sexual desire and entices Sloane into her home as a potential tenant before seducing him. This mirrors her past actions, such as when she seduced Ed's friend, Tommy. Kath ends up pregnant by Sloane, just as she did with Tommy. Desperate for love, she is lustful but tries to maintain an innocent facade, refusing to acknowledge her true self and pretending to be young, pure, and reputable. When it comes to Kemp's death, she humorously and sadly denies her father's condition for as long as possible. While she appears comical on the surface, Kath may be as cruel, vicious, and heartless as her brother deep down. Orton's biographer, John Lahr, noted that Kath is ironically based on Orton's mother, Elsie, who claimed to detest human sexuality and, like Kath, had a full set of false teeth.
Kemp
Kemp is the elderly father of Kath and Ed, living pathetically with Kath in the home that Sloane moves into. Hard of hearing and with poor vision, Kemp recognizes Sloane as the murderer of his former employer—a photographer who picked up Sloane while hitchhiking, took his picture, and then mistook him for a burglar when Sloane attempted to destroy the incriminating photos at night. Kemp has not communicated consistently with his son, Ed, for the past twenty years but breaks his silence to accuse Sloane of murder and causing Kath's pregnancy.
Stubborn and unaware of his own frailty, Kemp confronts Sloane at the end of Act II, refuses to heed Sloane's plea for silence, and is killed after Sloane attacks him. Kemp is likely the most "decent" character in the play and its sole true victim. He is inspired by Orton's own father, who was nearly blind and known as "Dadda."
