SOURCE: Loney, Glenn. “Entertaining Mr. Loney: An Early Interview with Joe Orton.” New Theatre Quarterly 4 (November 1988): 300-05.

[In the following essay, a report of a 1965 interview, Loney and the playwright talk about Entertaining Mr. Sloane, Orton's interest in the works of Jane Austen, the genre of black comedy, Orton's brief history in the theater, and other subjects.]

Every summer, drama teachers desert American college campuses in search of meaningful change or new experiences. Some paint their houses. Others fly off to London to see Broadway's newest hits before they arrive in New York. This has been going on for a long time now. In July 1964, as I was frantically making up my list of what to see in the West End and at Stratford, trying to cram in as many plays as possible, I found a curious photo in a Sunday arts section. It showed a pert young man in T-shirt, jeans, and tennis-shoes, casually stretched out on a bed with turned-down sheets. The wall behind him was a psychedelic riot of Old Master art images. (And not, as some who but dimly remember this photo insist, a collage of body-builders. That must have been another part of the wall.)

The caption revealed that this was a new young playwright who had recently been endorsed and encouraged by Terence Rattigan—whose own reputation was not then at its zenith. Indeed, the fledgling author had some pages of manuscript spread out on the bed, but he was looking neither at them nor at the camera. His gaze was directed stage-right, as if seeing something of which he slightly disapproved. The playwright was Joe Orton, and his new black comedy—the catchword was itself new—Entertaining Mr. Sloane was to open in the West End at Wyndhams Theatre, after a successful showing at the Arts.

At that time, Dudley Sutton, either clad in black leather or out of it entirely, was something of a surprise, especially when Madge Ryan and Peter Vaughan, as sister and brother both fascinated by Mr. Sloane's boyish but sinister allure, manoeuvred for his favours. Some may remember that incarnation of Sloane as having been successful, but in fact it ran only 152 performances. It did excite a lot of comment and controversy. Who was this new writer? No one seemed to know very much about him.

Then, on 12 October, 1965, Entertaining Mr. Sloane opened on Broadway at the venerable Lyceum Theatre, built in 1903, and once Daniel Frohman's repertory playhouse. Alan Schneider was directing, with Sheila Hancock as the amoral sister Kath. During rehearsals, I asked Schneider if I could talk with Orton about the play. I seemed to be one of the few New York theatre journalists (or drama teachers) who liked the play, or even knew about it. Schneider was delighted and arranged a talk backstage.

Burrowing through some old files, looking for clippings about Peter Brook, I discovered the transcript I made of that interview, on 9 October 1965. It has never been published—for the production opened to scathing, outraged reviews and rapidly closed after thirteen ill-attended performances. Orton had already gone back to London. By the time I had transcribed the tape, no one wanted to hear anything about either Mr. Sloane or Mr. Orton.

I cannot remember what I expected on my way to interview Orton. The photo-image was clearly etched in my memory, it's true, as well as that of Dudley Sutton, trousers off, getting a bit of a mend from Kath. Perhaps I thought I'd find Orton in black leather, not unlike his Sloane fantasy. In fact, I wasn't quite prepared for the actuality. A very boyish Orton, his face gleaming as if it had been oiled (I think it had been) greeted me warmly. He was togged out in a trim little blue-and-white striped nautical T-shirt and tight trousers. He was charm itself; he fairly twinkled. Sloane, it appeared, was not the only sham-innocent seducer in the Orton stable.

The London production, in my memory, had attained a kind of perfection. Schneider had Americanized the play and the performances somewhat, rather to its detriment I thought. At one point, when Kath was rummaging in a drawer, she pulled out a vaginal douche and waved it around with an apparent thrill of finding an old friend again. I admired Schneider, both as a director and as a friend, but this seemed a bit cheap. Looking at Sloane now, I wonder why I was bothered by this.

Orton certainly wasn't. He loved that bit of business. ‘Oh, that's just wonderful! I wish I'd thought of that. I ought to put it into the acting edition. Alan is a brilliant director! We don't have anybody like him in England anymore. Showy old directors we do have—but someone who will lift a play, bring out everything that is in a play, without imposing his own personality? We have directors like Peter Hall, who have Hamlet play in a red-and-white striped muffler. That's obvious direction. But Alan does the kind of direction a playwright loves. Well, I love it anyway.’

Having watched previous Schneider shows in rehearsal, and talked with some of his actors now and then, I told Orton that some complained that he didn't help them enough—that he let them work out the roles and the conflicts by themselves. Had he found this to be so with Sloane?

‘I've complained of that with directors in England, but I have no complaint with Alan. The things he's invented? I think I would have invented them myself—if I'd thought of them. That is always the best kind of direction.’

But had Schneider cut any of the lines? Possibly to avoid shocking susceptible New York critics?

‘There was one speech cut: that was all. And there were one or two lines that I altered, that an American audience wouldn't get. If they weren't important, and an American audience could “ride over” it—if it was just a typical British phrase—I left it in.’

Kath's revelation of pregnancy to her irate brother was one of these: ‘I've a bun in the oven.’ Not at all an American phrase, but graphic enough as Kath lifted her apron to disclose the results of a magical night with Mr. Sloane. Orton left such lines alone.

His work was just beginning to be discovered by the German theatre, and he noted with elation that Entertaining Mr. Sloane had been shown at the Hamburg Schauspielhaus in the august company of Shakespeare, Molière, and O'Neill. ‘I was really flattered’, he said. ‘I've got a whole thing at home, saying something good goes on here by Molière, and something by Shakespeare, and something by O'Neill, and a slight mention of Entertaining Mr. Sloane, which is very amazing. Well, it's nice to be taken seriously. I mean, I'm a serious dramatist.’

I told him that when I'd seen it in London, I thought the play was terrifically funny. But I hadn't seen any deep, dark metaphors or myths in it at all. Then, the day after I'd enjoyed it at Wyndhams, I had lunch with Harold Hobson. At that time, I was doing interviews with young writers and performers for the Christian Science Monitor, and he was its London critic, as well as the London Sunday Times reviewer.

Initially, I had regarded him as conservative, if sometimes eccentric in judgement. On our first meeting, he pointed out to me that he had been often the first of the major critics to spot new playwriting talent. He it was who urged me to interview David Storey, Peter Shaffer, Arnold Wesker, and others. Now, I wondered what he'd have to say about Orton and Sloane, for Hobson was never indecisive about likes and dislikes. He praised it as authentic black comedy. I told Orton this.

‘He's the only critic who spotted what Sloane was. I remember his words. His exact words were, “the Northanger Abbey of the theatre”. This was absolutely amazing. I wrote him a letter, saying that I've always admired Jane Austen's Juvenilia—before she wrote Sense and Sensibility. Northanger Abbey is of course Juvenilia, which she rewrote later in life. It was published after her death. I've always admired Northanger Abbey.

‘She really is one—’ Orton broke off, trying to think of a comparison. ‘I can go overboard on her works’, he limply concluded. ‘Most people read Jane Austen—like people who read Edna Ferber, and only see the chi-chi 1890s side. Northanger Abbey is wonderful because it's a straight novel, and yet it has a wonderful element of Stendahl that you can appreciate. It was really very perceptive of Hobson to recognize this. I admired him for seeing what no one else saw in it.’

This was a time in British theatre when myths and ancient rituals were being recalled, not only to give added resonance to Stratford Shakespeare productions, which were already echoing with subtextual inferences, but also, for example, to give dark meaning to seemingly ordinary farm work, as in David Rudkin's then shocking Afore Night Come. Rudkin's debt to Fraser and The Golden Bough seemed clear enough. Jane Austen's influence in Entertaining Mr. Sloane was harder to detect, but once one thought about it. …

‘You believed so much in these labourers’, Orton was saying of Rudkin's play. ‘Rudkin's the one person I've read that I'd give my eye-teeth to write dialogue like. But I cannot believe in the ritual murder. I can believe that these people set on somebody and beat him in a senseless fury, but I can't believe that Golden Bough thing.’

How ironic then was Orton's own death later to prove, when his teeming brain was smashed by the envious hammer-blows of his mentor—roommate, Kenneth Halliwell, to whom he dedicated Sloane. At once a crime of passion—and of failure and bitter disappointment—and also a kind of ritual murder. …

Orton continued talking about myth: ‘Symbolism like that should be integrated into the play. I mean, in Sloane I am aware of the symbols of the waste-land, and of the house at the edge of the waste-land. And that the old man is the king of the waste-land, who is killed by the young man. But it doesn't matter for Sloane if you haven't read The Golden Bough. Whereas, in Afore Night Come, I think if you haven't read it, you are lost.’

We were talking only three days before Sloane's Broadway premiere. As far as Orton knew then, he had written a shocking black comedy which had had a modest West End success, which led critics to foresee an interesting future for him. Its resounding Broadway failure and aftermath he was to experience later, largely from a safe distance. On 9 October, however, Orton still thought he had written a strong, challenging comedy, and he was not ashamed that it had enjoyed some commercial recognition.

‘I did get some sneers at Sloane for being a “commercial” drama. I think that's because it had a successful West End run. It's this ridiculous thing that there's some kind of intrinsic merit in failure. There's not! We all know that some good plays go on—and they fail. But so many bad plays go on. There's no merit in playing three nights in a cellar unless the play is good. You know there is an awful lot of rubbish put on for three nights in cellars, just as there is rubbish in the commercial theatre.

‘I resent this thing of being considered a “commercial dramatist”. Sheila Hancock was trying to cheer me up. She said, “You playwrights think people are using the word ‘commercial’ as a sneer.” Well, they are! O'Neill, and Wilde in his day, were very commercial. And so was Barrie, and Shaw. …’

Orton revealed that he had been hard at work on a new play, and now it was finished. ‘It's called Loot. The William Morris Agency read it. They adored it. They said it's better than Sloane, and they want to put it on. I want it to go on in America first, because I think it will be done better here. If it's done over here first, then we can correct it.’

‘You see, the terrible thing in England is that the Arts Theatre is more or less finished. Sloane was about the last thing put on there. The Arts Theatre has gone down the drain. To get into the Royal Court, you have to be on a political committee, which I'm not.’

Where were the other small theatres? Joan Littlewood's theatre at Stratford East? ‘She's no longer there. She had a special personality. You could disagree with everything she did—which I did very frequently. I saw her productions, and I disagreed with them, but she compelled you to go there. You couldn't not go.’

In the event of a success in New York for Sloane, Orton was certain that it couldn't be toured around the United States. Outside New York, he feared audiences would be actively hostile. ‘There are problems with a play like Sloane, or most certainly like Loot.’ He sighed. ‘They just don't understand.’

Did he think that regional audiences would denounce the play? ‘Well, you really wouldn't mind if they denounced it. But the thing that happens is that they say, “Well, these are totally unbelievable characters?” “I don't understand it!” “I don't like these jokes!” “I don't understand what you are making a joke about.” Even if they may be living exactly the same way at home themselves. I get some weird comments. I usually mingle with the audience.’

Had he heard, as I had at Wyndhams, spectators speculating on the dirtiness of his mind?

‘I think I've got just an average mind—but what happens? Right after Sloane came on, there was something in News of the World about a man and his wife sharing another woman. So I think that lesbianism is slightly more respectable than homosexuality!’

Noting that the first German production of Loot would be in Munich, capital of High Catholic Bavaria, Orton explained: ‘Actually, it's a Catholic household, in which a death has occurred. There are some ridiculous jokes. The boy has sex with the girl underneath a picture of the Sacred Heart. And then the boy's friend says to the girl, “While Jesus is pointing to His Sacred Heart, you're pointing to yours!”’

Orton explained that, while not a Catholic himself, ‘Catholicism was always a fascinating thing for me. I've always worked—when I've worked—in warehouses and things. I've always seemed to be working with Catholic Irishmen. And so, in the end, I just got a sort of thing: that I could think like they thought. And, of course, religion is an endless subject for satire and parody.

‘You see, in order to be funny about morals, you must have characters who are moral. And if you want characters to be extremely moral—from an English standpoint—you must set it in a Catholic household. The Protestant household is no longer the same. Protestantism—I don't know about America—no longer exists in England. So one must have a Catholic background. Of course the obvious thing in England is an Irish Catholic background, somewhere in Camden Town or Kilburn. As far as I'm concerned, it's an endless subject for satire.’

I told Orton how arresting the Sunday arts photo of him had seemed.

‘That was a dreadful picture! I don't know why they took that. Oh, they wanted a picture of the background, of the wall. They wanted the picture there, so they had me lying on the bed, with a sort of double chin. It looked terrible!’

I reassured him I'd seen no double chin. and the photo didn't look terrible. ‘Didn't it? Well, I don't think that Rattigan thing helped. … Well, I'd always been writing—for years. You see, I'd written some plays, but I'd written them before the advent of Waiting for Godot. There were things I wanted to do, but I couldn't until the modern school appeared. You couldn't have done Sloane ten years ago. They were really rather strange plays. I did one that was called Feathers—kind of a funny title. But that is really a commercial title.

‘I was trying to write for the commercial theatre. You see, this was pre-Godot. Well, once Godot came on, you could not—even if you would—write that rot any more. So I started, but I didn't think I could write anything like Godot. I was writing novels mostly, because I thought you could do much more interesting things in the novel at that time.

‘Then I went to prison’, he said. At this time, he did not elaborate. Later, in the course of an extended correspondence across the Atlantic, he quipped that he was jailed for Grand Larceny, which proved to be ‘not so grand, as it turned out’.

‘When I came out’, Orton said, ‘I wrote a full-length play. I showed it to someone whose judgement I respected. He said, “It is awful, and you seem to have lost all your talent for dialogue, having been in prison.” I said, “All right”, but I was rather depressed. I went away and cut it down to about a quarter of its length, and I cut out two characters. I rewrote it and titled it The Ruffian on the Stair.

‘I sent it to the BBC because it was a one-act. The BBC accepted it. Then the friend I'd showed it to said, “Oh, you've done so many amazing things to it …”. Well, it took about eighteen months for the BBC to decide that they were going to put it on. I was living on National Assistance, and they were getting more and more annoyed with me because I didn't get a job. I had no intention of getting a job.

‘The BBC said, “What are you doing? Are you writing another play for us?” I said, “No, because you take so long.” I was writing a full-length stage-play then. So they said, “Well, if you are going to do that, you do need an agent.” And so they gave me the address of Margaret Ramsay, who is an excellent agent. She doesn't care about the money. If she likes you, she'll support you.

‘I sent Sloane to her just before Christmas 1963. Immediately, in the New Year, I got a letter saying, “I don't know if it would be a full evening's entertainment.” She probably wouldn't remember that now. Well, anyway, she showed it to a London manager.

‘They wanted to put it on at Stratford East, originally. I was a bit dubious, because I knew that Joan Littlewood, who ran Stratford East at that time, would have ripped it apart. I mean, she would have introduced all sorts of new characters. And it probably would have been a success, but it wouldn't have been my play. Finally, Michael Codron said he would put it on at the Arts Theatre. And the rest you know.’

The rest, which neither of us suspected at that point, was that most of the Broadway reviewers would dislike or even hate Entertaining Mr. Sloane. Walter Kerr concealed any Catholic bias against the play's amorality by saying that Sloane was indeed a ‘bizarre black comedy’, but that it wasn't black enough. It was, however, more than enough for most. The New York Times's Howard Taubman thought it made ‘the Jukes family seem like sane, honourable folk!’

Normal Nadel, of the now-defunct World Telegram, insisted that Sloane had the ‘sprightly charm of a medieval English cesspool’. Had he, all unknowing, stumbled over the doorstep of Northanger Abbey? He found it a ‘macabre, decaying kind of comedy’, in any case. Richard Watts thought Sloane ‘outrageous’. CBS-TV branded Sloane ‘sick, sick, sick’.

Soon to return to London, Joe Orton asked me to send him any reviews or comments on Sloane I might come across. Taubman of the Times later returned to the attack. When Orton received this next essay in dramatic criticism, he wrote back immediately: ‘Methinks the lady doth protest too much.’ Thus began a correspondence which ended shortly before Orton's unfortunate death. He asked me to comment on the German translations of Sloane and Loot—Seid nett zu Mr. Sloane and Boute—for he could not read German, but realized that Sloane had done well and Loot not so well auf Deutsch, with different translators. Was that the source of the trouble? It certainly seemed possible: Sloane in German was a marvel.

As soon as Orton discovered that I functioned as a reviewer as well as an interviewer, he wrote: ‘I loved you for yourself alone; I didn't realize you were a critic.’ Still smarting from critical jibes, in a later letter Orton noted that he'd just been to see Harold Pinter's The Homecoming. ‘Very brilliant play. The best he's written. Sexual sharing takes place in that too. A girl, though. Makes it more wholesome, I suppose. I've often wondered what foreigners think of England these days. If they relate the play to life, they must imagine we live in a Medieval Cesspool.’

Our friendship was almost entirely postal, but every summer, as soon as I arrived in London, I'd phone Orton, who always insisted on giving me lunch. He wouldn't hear of my paying: ‘I'm really making some money now’, he'd explain. Then we'd eat and pore over his clipping-books, noting the favourable reviews and features first. For the rest, Orton would either dismiss them or explain in detail how wrong the critic was and, in any case, a fool.

But after an hour or so, Orton would begin checking the time. Once, lunching at the Arts, I suggested we continue our discussion of the impending demise of the commercial theatre while making the rounds of a special exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery.

‘No, I can't. I'm sorry but I've got to get home.’ And off he'd go, to Flat 4, 25 Noel Road, Islington, N1, clutching his clippings.