CHAOS IN FRAYING CHINTZ
Catching up after a break away I nipped in to check whether after 60 years Joe Orton can still get people gasping with shock. Peter McIntosh’s set alone is a dark treat : a chintzy circle of a lounge surrounded by a rubbish tip and overhung by dozens of furnishings: cradle, bike, chairs, tables, brolly – all painted wicked drab black, as if an explosive curse had hit a household. My neighbour, marking his 80th birthday with a matinee, reminisced happily with me (the Young Vic’s like that, people chat) . We both remembered childhood and teenage years of just such grim weary postwar lodgings, every furnishing telling a story. And perhaps in his case, there were landladies like Kath.
Cast and costume equally catch that shabby worn-out downmarket England .and its pretensions and yearnings and cheapnesses: Tamzin Outhwaite’s brittle needy refinement and ever-ready negligée for frighteningly determined flirtation; Christopher Fairbank’s worn out stroppy Dada, and Daniel Cerquiera’s Eddy in three-piece tweed and tiepin, nursing his own dark needs and fraying pride.
Of course it’s Sloan, the outsider, the Orton disruptor, who fixes horrified attention first: Jordan Stephens has a way of smiling, of threatening, of eating a ham sandwich in the dim walkway, which bring on an odd shudder. Even before he suddenly starts rocking in studded leather under strobe lights as the second half begins. Maybe he is nowt but a lout …but maybe (shiver). the monsters are elsewhere in this monstrous trap of a home. Certainly something is rousing our gradual unease at their predatory gentility and devastating choice of strangely formal words, (Orton has the ear of a laughing demon for English vernacular, the way grimy sweepings lie under every carpeting word).
Anyway, the answer to my question – do Ortonian shocks still hit hard? is Yes. They do. Beautifully aggravated with a couple of bits of strobe-lit surrealism in the second half. Brutal.
Another reflection, alongside my newly octogenarian seat companion, was that the boringly self-indulgent stuff John Osborne served up in Look Back in Anger a few years earlier actually said far, far less about how postwar Britain needed to change and roll on through the ‘sixties, than does this sharp cruel hilarity from poor young Joe Orton. He said it all: If only he had lived, even mellowed a bit, and had a chance to jeer at the seventies, eighties, nineties… What a loss.
But Nadia Fall’s production does him proud. Another couple of weeks to catch it, very good prices, generally rather good company in the cheap seats.
Youngvic.org to 8 nov
Rating four
theatreCat 