Joe Orton's festival spirit scintillates through … Loot. In the anarchy of Orton's carnival, the sacred and the profane, good and evil, night and day are tumbled together. The boundaries of the everyday world are dissolved in order to be re-examined. A trickster, Orton put laughter back into sexuality and let its aggressiveness run riot. His jokes 'played for keeps' about serious issues. Comedy, like all play, is most thrilling when it is tense; and there was a whiff of danger in Orton's laughter. His plays were offensive, elegant, cruel, shocking, monstrous, hilarious and smart. In short, brilliant theatre.

Loot, whose original title was Funeral Games, sports with the culture's superstitions about death as well as life. 'It's a Freudian nightmare,' says the son, Hal, who is about to dump his mother's corpse from her coffin into the wardrobe in order to hide money he's stolen. And so it is. Comedy always acts out unconscious wishes which must be suppressed in daily life, and Orton seized this liberation with a vengeance. In Loot, viscera fly like brickbats around the room…. The shock of seeing 'human remains desecrated' is to realise that they are no longer human. Like gargoyles on a mediaeval cathedral, Orton's ghoulish spectacle is meant to scare people into life. Like all festivals, Loot revels in the gratifications of the moment. Hal, who is unrepentantly bisexual and who has no job, won't forestall pleasure at the threat of social 'death'. (pp. 30-1)

The trickster is an enemy to order. Orton sports with the police and the British public's uncritical acceptance of police authority. Truscott is an outlandish parody of the omniscient B-movie gumshoe…. Orton takes devastating potshots at authority and those, like the credulous Mr McLeavy, who surrender themselves completely to it….

In the end, greed conquers all. Truscott shares the money with the others; and the only innocent man on stage, McLeavy, is sent to prison…. [No] superstition, Orton is saying, can save us from the facts of life.

Loot is a major theatrical step forward from Entertaining Mr Sloane, but the style is caught between farce and satire….

Orton found his mature comic style in Loot. He couldn't resist writing his own review in Truscott's literary appraisal of Fay's confession: 'Your style is simple and direct. It's a theme which less skillfully handled could've given offence.' Orton still gave offence while pretending he wasn't. He called this tactic 'the British art of compromise'…. Orton's theatre world is irresistible. Orton expected to die young, but his plays were made to last. (p. 31)