"Entertaining Mr Sloane". Burton Taylor.

What on earth was going on with home invasion theatre in the 1960s? They just couldn’t get enough of it. Harold Pinter had The Caretaker, Frederick Knott had Wait Until Dark, and Joe Orton had Entertaining Mr Sloane. Maybe Chubb keys were yet to be invented, and coming home to find strange people in your house was an abiding fear for everyday folk. For whatever reason, it certainly provided the theatre with a steady stream of paranoia-drama, based on the idea that our little lives are rounded with not so much a sleep, more a nightmare.

What makes Pinter and Orton particularly unsettling is that they’re not just paranoid and threatening; they’re also – and at the same time – very funny.

Every dramatist has a wavelength. And it’s the job of a production to find that wavelength, get on it, and ride it to the end. One company may do it completely differently from another, but they must find that true relationship, that sense of just what the author was on about, or their show will founder, like an orchestra whose violins are all out of tune with each other. And what we have with this particular production of Entertaining Mr Sloane is a show that sadly just didn’t find that wavelength.

There’s no shame in this. Orton is notoriously impenetrable, eccentric, even outlandish, in his style – and deliberately so. He’s like an innocent-faced schoolboy who’s just stabbed everyone’s favourite Geography teacher, and no one can figure out why. Malcolm McDowell once played the role of Sloane, and he must have been perfect for it.

There was no lack of effort from the cast. Maisie Lambert was truly outstanding in the role of Kath, showing natural comic ability and timing. In fact, all the laughs from the audience this evening came from her performance. Am Wyckoff was also disturbingly intense as Mr Sloane. Where it went wrong was that none of the constituent parts seemed to fit together. The characters might almost have been in different plays. Kath was clearly costumed and made up to look seductive, and yet is constantly described by the others as physically repulsive. Ed’s words sounded rough and bullying, and yet his delivery was in the style of a refined gentleman. And why his sister sounded northern and he as if raised in the Home Counties was just baffling.

There was a constant sense of characters half-trying to flirt with each other, as if they didn’t quite have the gumption to go for it 100%. Too much stunted flirtation, never a good idea. And on top of all this the whole thing was strangely downplayed all the time, with characters constantly reducing their interactions to the level of near-whisper, as if revealing deep personal truths to each other, when in fact they were just making a point about the location of Dad’s pills.

Let me be clear: I don’t doubt the talent of the cast and crew. In fact there was one section, right at the end, in which Kath, Sloane and Ed are arguing in short, parallel sentences about covering up the murder of Kemp, when they genuinely did get in tune with Orton. That was a wonderful moment. And I’m sure the production company, An Exciting New (great name by the way), will be back with exciting and indeed new shows in the near future. But for most of this evening, it stuttered along. If you’ve ever played with an electric toy train, and one of its wheels isn’t properly on the track – it was like that.