Orton's Loot as "Quotidian Farce": The Intersection of Black Comedy and Daily Life

Orton's Loot as "Quotidian Farce": The Intersection of Black Comedy and Daily Life MAURICE CHARNEY After his mother died, one of the few remembrances Joe Orton wanted was her false teeth: "I found my mother's teeth in a drawer. I kept them. To amaze the cast of Loot. .. . '" Orton's diary for January 4, 1967, supplies more details about the incident: I'd taken my mother's false teeth down to the theatre. I said to Kenneth Cranham [who played Hall. "Here, I thought you'd like the originals." He said, "What?" "Teeth," I said. "Whose?" he said. "My mum's,"I said. He looked very sick. "You see," I said, "It's obvious that you're not thinking afthe events afthe play in tenns ofreality ifathing affects you like that." Simon Ward [who played Dennis] shook like jelly when I gave them to him.. .. (Lahr, p. 192) Orton insisted that Loot should be thought of "in tenns of reality," and not as a stylized, mechanized farce. The dentures of the dead Mrs. McLeavy figure importantly in a bizarre scene in Act One of Loot where the homicidal nurse, Fay, is undressing the corpse and has already handed across the screen, "in quick succession, a pair of corsets, a brassiere and a pair ofknickers.'" She asks: "Are you committed to having her teeth removed?", and Hal, the homosexual, bank-robbing son answers, "Yes." Meanwhile, Hal is fantasizing about the two-star or three-star brothel he will run with the loot from the bank robbery: I'd advertise "By Appointment." Likejam. ... I'd have aFrench bird, aDutch bird, a Belgian bird, an Italian bird FAY hands a pair offalse teeth across the screen. - and abird that spoke fluent Spanish and perfonned the dances of her native country to perfection. (He clicks the teeth like castanets.) I'd call it the Consurnmatum Est. And it'd be the most famous house of ill-fame in the who1e of Eng1and. Orton's Loot as "Quotidian Farce" FAY appears from behind the screen. HAL holds up the teeth. These are good teeth. Are they the National Health? 515 FAY No. She bought them out of her winnings. She had some good evenings at the table last year. (pp. 226-27) We can readily understand why Kenneth Cranham, who played Hal, looked very sick and Simon Ward, who played Dennis, shook like jelly when Orton handed around his mother's teeth "like nuts at Christmas" (p. 272), as the hard-boiled detective Truscott says in a comparable scene in Loot - "Your sense of detachment is terrifying, lad. Most people would at least flinch upon seeing their mother's eyes and teeth handed around like nuts at Christmas" (p. 272). Orton was cutting through the artificialities and the stilted conventions of West End farce to make a point about what we might call "quotidian farce," which is much closer to black comedy than to the upper-class, comedy-ofmanners assumptions ofRestoration comedy, or even the middle-class gentility that Feydeau so deftly titillated in his brilliant social comedies. Orton is returning farce'to its roots in Plautus and the Italic fertility and harvest rituals that farce celebrates. Like Plautus, Orton is crude and vulgar, although in Orton the language and the action seem to be moving in two entirely opposite directions. Thus Hal speaks with affected chic (and a learned pun) of his new brothel, the Consummatum Est, while clicking his mother's false teeth like castanets. Death as the ultimate tabooed subject (with sex aclose second) is also the optimum subject to energize a vulgar, realistic farce cloaked in the empty, genteel cliches ofthe English Welfare State. We remember that Ronald Bryden called Orton the "Oscar Wilde of Welfare State gentility" (Lahr, p. 221). Apparently Orton's mother, Elsie, was very fastidious about her dentures, which she kept soaking in bleach in order to produce a blindingly white, million dollar smile. As Kath, the mother/whore surrogate of Entertaining Mr Sloane, apologizes to the young lodger/sex object Sloane, My teeth, since you mentioned the subject, Mr Sloane, are in the kitchen in Stergene. Usually I allow a good soak: overnight. But...