Getting away with it : ‘Loot’ returns to Swinging London for a tale of murder and robbery … and laughs

From left, Ned Schmidtke as Truscott and Wyatt Fenner as Dennis. DAVID BAZEMORE PHOTOS
From left, Ned Schmidtke as Truscott and Wyatt Fenner as Dennis.
DAVID BAZEMORE PHOTOS

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,” said L.P. Hartley in his opening lines to “The Go-Between.” Joe Orton’s “Loot,” which opened this past weekend at the Alhecama Theatre, is very foreign indeed. The farce makes traveling back to the Swinging London of the mid-1960s feel as long a trip as one to Oscar Wilde’s 19th-century Britain. As they say about traveling in new cars, your mileage may vary.

Orton was the enfant terrible of the new playwrights of his time, busting genres like Tom Stoppard but poking the establishment where it irritated them most. With his life cut short at age 34, we wonder where Orton might have gone — more political like Stoppard or Harold Pinter? Would he have been an ambassador of bad taste, like our filmmaker John Waters? Or just petered out?

Read More

Life Imitates Farce – Joe Orton’s ‘Loot’ comes to Ensemble Theatre

Clockwise from top left: Julian Rubel plays policeman Bobby Meadows, Heather Prete is Fay, Kerby Joe Grubb plays Hal and Wyatt Fenner is Dennis in Ensemble's "Loot." David Bazemore Photo
Clockwise from top left: Julian Rubel plays policeman Bobby Meadows, Heather Prete is Fay, Kerby Joe Grubb plays Hal and Wyatt Fenner is Dennis in Ensemble’s “Loot.”
David Bazemore Photo

During the original stage run of Joe Orton’s “Loot,” which features a dead mother as a plot device that spurs the action, the playwright’s mother died.

Orton went to Leicester for the funeral, then returned to London and the production. There is a scene where the dead mother’s false teeth are played like castanets. Backstage, Orton handed his mother’s real set to the actor Kenneth Cranham, who blanched.

Read More