Entertaining Mr. Sloane
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There are sharp differences between the two plays. What the Butler Saw is a frenetic, frothy farce-cum-burlesque about sexual shenanigans in a madhouse whose operators are crazier than their patients (the operators’ playmates turn out to be their own teenage offspring). Entertaining Mr. Sloane is a dark comedy about a young drifter who exposes repressed desires and suppressed secrets in a middle-class family. Both exuberantly embrace forbidden pleasures and delight in addressing topics that most viewers would have found unlikely fodder for fun–homosexuality, incest, fetishism, illegitimate pregnancy. Entertaining Mr. Sloane is less laugh-out-loud funny than What the Butler Saw, its eroticism both less overt and more perverse. But it’s pure pleasure to sit back and watch its sly, sinister plot take shape.
Orton’s sexual unorthodoxy is a means to an end: in both these works he fries much bigger fish than merely who does what to whom. Both depict the destruction of a morally proper old order–symbolized in Sloane by a doomed elderly man and in Butler by the preserved phallus of Winston Churchill–and its replacement by a generation that publicly promotes traditional values but practices amoral self-indulgence. The focus of both is the institution of the family, which supposedly nurtures proper values and provides the foundation of a healthy, virtuous society. In Orton’s view, society is neither virtuous nor healthy. It’s a rubbish heap governed by a repressive, reactionary, misogynistic old boys’ network. The male authority figures in these plays are phony paragons of responsibility and rectitude whose sexual hypocrisy is a manifestation of deeper corruption. If these blokes would only own up to their own repression–not only their homosexual inclinations but their fundamental promiscuity–the world would be a better, happier place, Orton suggests. Instead, society is a hotbed of humbuggery, with emphasis on the buggery.
With its portrayal of sexy young men and manipulative parent figures, Entertaining Mr. Sloane suggests the influence of Edward Albee’s 1960 The American Dream and 1962 Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? There are also similarities to Harold Pinter’s 1965 The Homecoming, in which an Englishman’s American wife is recruited by his father and brothers as their resident whore. Orton’s plot oddly echoes that of Emlyn Williams’s 1935 thriller Night Must Fall, in which a charming psychopath insinuates himself into the home and heart of his intended victim.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Johnny Knight.
