Getting away with it
Loot
Step through the proverbial looking glass for a moment and picture a place where the righteous are punished, the reprobates walk free and amorality is delightfully humorous. In this, the world of Joe Orton, it is perfectly acceptable to replace the corpse of your fictional dead mother with cash while using the false teeth of your actual dead mother as a prop.
Charlie Morrison, unlike Orton himself is, alas, not fortunate enough to have a dead mother willing to lend her teeth but he does have a hilarious script and a cast that are more than able to do it justice. Loot follows two likely lads, Hal (played by Nick Budd) and Dennis (Tom Cartlidge) as they descend towards their moral nadir in an attempt to preserve the wages of a bank robbery.
Catholicism, an errant policeman and a ‘femme fatale’ complicate matters with the result that the only decent character in the entire play (McLeavy played by Tom Profumo) is carted off to prison. The plot, like the corpse, may smell a little of farce and/or formaldehyde, Profumo’s somewhat one dimensional performance certainly adds to the effect, however the underlying darkness of the thing acts as something of a kick in the dentures.
Lotte Wakeham is icily sexual and shamelessly golddigging as Fay, a nurse who kills rather than cures her patients. Budd and Cartlidge are like something from the fervid imagination of a confused yet tasteful schoolboy involving a younger Michael Kane and a cleaner Robert Downey junior, in a word delicious.
It is a shame that the scathing religious critique no longer packs quite the same punch that it once would have done although the relaxation of censorship laws stipulating that a dummy serve as the corpse on stage and prohibiting the use of ‘kensington gore’ of any description is part compensation. The decision have an actress play Hal’s mother is creepily comic.
Loot does everything a good play should, it makes you laugh, it makes you think and it gives you the chance to stare for an hour or so at some attractive boys. I highly recommend it.
4th May 2006