Be nice to Mr. Sloane
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| Title: | Be nice to Mr. Sloane |
| Original title: | Entertaining Mr. Sloane |
| Genus: | play |
| Original language: | English |
| Author: | Joe Orton |
| Publishing year: | 1964 |
| Premiere: | May 6, 1964 |
| Place of premiere: | New Arts Theater, West End , London |
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Be nice to Mr. Sloane (Original title: Entertaining Mr. Sloane ) is a play in three acts by the British playwright Joe Orton . It is his first work .
action
Mr. Sloane, a nice-looking young man, becomes the lodger of the siblings Kath and Ed and their father Kemp. The 40-year-old Kath, who was abandoned by her lover at a young age, quickly becomes Sloane's surrogate mother and lover. Her homosexual brother Ed, however, gives Sloane a hand by bringing him into his business. In the further course, Sloane gradually drops his masquerade and turns out to be a lazy, conceited parasite who terrorizes the family with his mood swings. Then Kemp believes he recognizes the murderer of his former boss in Sloane, so that Sloane feels compelled to murder him. Kath and Ed just watched and then camouflaged the murder, because they realized that they now have Sloane in their hands. Neither of the two wants to lose him. So the two make the compromise to share Sloane as lovers in the future.
Performances
The premiere took place on May 6, 1964 at the New Arts Theater in London. The German premiere was on November 2nd of the same year at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg , under the direction of Hans Lietzau . After its first performance, the play celebrated its premiere on Broadway on October 12, 1965 and was performed again in 1975, 2005, 2007 and 2009, among others.
reception
Orton's first work was considered very provocative at the time of the apparition, especially due to the openly portrayed homosexuality, which was still a criminal offense at the time.
The piece is considered an amoral piece, the farce of which is in turn a means of moral criticism, “... which is directed not only against the inhumanity and callousness of people, which Orton perceives as blatant, but above all against the tendency to instigate this inhumanity Obviously, to veil the seeming, puritanically tinged moral [...] ”, as Hubert Zapf writes in Knaur's great actor.
The theater director Ernst Wendt praised the play and said: “... Orton has discovered the comedy of the pervert [...] and he handles the amoral as pleasantly and wittily and easily as if it were the most everyday things: evil, but only too human ... ".
Film adaptations
The play was adapted for British television in 1968. A theatrical adaptation was released in 1970, starring Beryl Reid as Kath, Harry Andrews as Ed and Peter McEnery as Mr. Sloane.
Remarks
- ↑ Knaurs Großes Schauspielführer, 1985, p. 507.
- ↑ Ernst Wendt in Theater heute , 1964, issue 12.