Loot – Sydney Theatre Company

Overview

Playwright Joe Orton has a most extraordinary biography. Starting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art at age 18, he immediately met his best friend, lover and constant collaborator, Kenneth Halliwell, with whom he worked on numerous epic novels that no-one wanted to publish and a series of public pranks that pissed off all of England. When one of these pranks — replacing library book covers with their own art — earned them six-month jail terms, Orton and Halliwell were separated for the first time in 11 years and Orton forced to write on his own. He soon became a hit, his plays running back-to-back through the '60s. Halliwell, meanwhile, became mired in depression and plagued by personal and professional jealousy, until one night in 1967 he bludgeoned Orton with a hammer before consuming an overdose of pills. It is said that Halliwell died first.

It's almost as if no story Orton himself wrote could compare to the intensely poetic and tragic one he lived. The antidote is that he wrote comedies, great slabs of satire that held up a mirror to British society. In Loot, a play he retooled over many years till it finally earned rave reviews, it's the day of Mrs McLeavy's funeral, and her widower (William Zappa) is grieving. It's an upper-middle class household — decked in the requisite crucifixes, flying ducks, and pattern clash of wallpapers — so when wastrel son Hal (Robin Goldsworthy) enters looking like he stepped out of the photo shoot for Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, it's obvious he's trouble.

Sure enough, he and his mate, working-class assistant undertaker Dennis (Josh McConville), have robbed a bank and, with the police on their tail, decide to stash the cash in his mother's coffin, enlisting her nurse Fay (Caroline Craig) to help. What follows are madcap hijinks with dead bodies. It's all so very English.

Australia has at least one consummate comedian who immediately comes to mind for this sort of old-fashioned farce, Darren Gilshenan — and fortunately enough, he's in this, too. His cutthroat yet clueless detective (or employee of the water board, as he too-long insists as his cover) is a joy to watch. Gilshenan can make the simple act of taking a pipe out of his pocket a complex journey in absurdity, slapstick and subversion. Beside him, the other actors all hold their own, and Goldsworthy in particular pulls out some great grimaces as the cheeky young Hal.

Teeming with fast talk, twisted logic and biting class observations, Loot is a good '60s satire staged in much the same way it would have been in the '60s. It can be, since its themes of bureaucratic corruption, religious hypocrisy, prodigal youth, prudish age and the taboo of death remain current, and classic British humour will always find a welcoming audience. But today's theatregoers may find themselves searching for an awareness of gender and other social constructs that isn't there and that hasn't been teased out.

Without bringing much new to the table, this production has only limited interest. Still, you can take your parents to Loot, and afterward, hunt down the Orton biopic Prick Up Your Ears, with Gary Oldman as Joe, for yourself.