THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
By Joe Orton
Young Vic Theatre, The Cut, London SE1 until November 8, 2025
"I'm in the rude under this dress. I tell you because you're bound to have noticed" is one of the great lines from Orton's subversive gem of a play, which landed in the West End like a hand grenade in 1964. But, in this production, when the sexually voracious Kath utters these immortal lines she's actually not wearing her usual flimsy transparent chiffon outfit of choice at all but rather a primly suburban skirt, like a Dagenham housewife. It sums up this tonally muddled production which gets Orton so wrong in so many respects. Director Nadia Fall, here making her debut as Artistic Director, manages to make this play prissy when it needs to be predatory.
It is as flat as an old ITV sitcom that would have lasted one season and it thinks Orton wrote farces, which he definitely did not. This tale of the struggle of an ageing nymphomaniac Kath (Tamzin Outhwaite) and her deeply closeted homosexual brother Ed (Daniel Cerqueira) for the possession of the body and soul of the murderous young thug Sloane (Jordan Stephens), mercilessly mocks English sensibilities and the sexual hypocrisy of the time. It couldn't be further from Ray Cooney.
Crucial to it is that Orton wrote in a very particular voice where formal stately language covers up appalling behaviour and violent action. His characters wear their language like a mask. Kath aspires to gentility, and passes, but sadly here Outhwaite has her in full blustery East Enders mode, with none of the rogueish seductiveness which Beryl Reid so memorably brought to the part on both stage and screen.
For a play about sexual obsession there is zero sexual chemistry even from the off when we first meet Kath after she has picked up Sloane in a graveyard. Here, it's like he's popping round to Aunties.
In a BBC radio interview on Orton, Sheila Hancock, who played Kath on Broadway, recounted that Orton told her off for turning up for first rehearsal in a tarty blonde wig (as Outhwaite dons here). "No, he said, she's a brunette" and added that she has to appear middle class. Reid understood that Kath is grotesque, overweight and over the hill, but still fighting to win her man and hopefully hold on to her dentures.
Daniel Cerqueira too is rather one note as Ed, lacking the vituperative pomposity and bolt upright menace that the character requires. A demented, queer mason. The dialogue also reveals him to be a shocking misogynist, yet here he gently pats Kath on the bum at one point. Christopher Fairbank comes off best however as the rancid, put-upon Dada, in a make up that makes him look a dead ringer for Eric Sykes (a brilliant English comedy writer, comedian, actor and director from, mainly, the 1950s to '70s).
Under Fall's direction too many line readings fall flat and the comic joy of the dialogue is lost. There is no sense of jeopardy either and so when Sloane finally does turn violent it appears to come from nowhere.
Stephens, who is making his stage debut, is a musician (half of the duo Rizzle Kicks), writer and blogger, and sadly all at sea here. Sloane is a hustler and conman who knows how to deploy his charms and while Stephens has a boyish winning way about him there is none of the underlying menace which must lie beneath the surface of this mercenary murderer.
Peter McIntosh's in-the-round design might be striking but is curiously disconnected from the piece. A vast array of furniture and bric-a-brac is artfully suspended overhead alluding to the dump site which is meant to surround the house. The costumes are hit and miss too, with the men's well judged, but Kath's way off the mark. Sloane's leather outfit though is a perfect evocation of a leather fetishist's idea of a chauffeur's uniform.
Fall did some great things at the Theatre Royal Stratford East and let's hope this is just a false start at the Young Vic.
