Sloane play more of a shock to senses than entertaining

Bleak and uncomfortable, Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane is by no means an easy play to watch.

As an indication of the once controversial nature of the material a recording of Jimmy Savile presenting Top of the Pops opens proceedings.

Orton’s 1960s play throws together four pretty odious characters - the unbalanced and obsessive landlady who has the mentality of a very strange child, her bigoted father, the depraved and manipulative lodger and his misogynistic and unscrupulous employer - and through their murky love triangle satirises the views of what would have been widely deemed as improper conduct at the time when the piece was written.

The themes it addresses - children born out of wedlock , illegal homosexuality, and racial bigotry, are no longer quite the taboo subjects they were in the Swinging Sixties But the way they are approached are still eye-opening for younger viewers and probably a stark reminder to those who lived in the period.

Stripped of some of its controversy these days, the play probably serves more as a dark tale of murder and extreme possessiveness rather than a ‘black comedy’.

It can still be hard-hitting mainly because of the transition of its main character Sloane.

Played with assurance and menace by Chris Gibley-Smith, the lodger appears at first likeable, cocky, but not altogether trustworthy - an ‘Artful Dodger’ type of Londoner.

But as his violent past catches up with him and his he eventually turns out to be more like Malcolm McDowell’s Alex in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange.

Supported by Kate Sawyer, Neil Vallance and Howard Scott Walker - who all displayed the right level of strangeness and dysfunctional, Smith takes us to a dark place, which is difficult but important and interesting to endure.

Oliver Williams