These Footnotes accompany our episode on Joe Orton’s classic black comedy, Entertaining Mr Sloane, and include additional notes on Orton’s alter-ego Edna Welthorpe, the language of keeping up appearances, Sloane’s lack of innocence, and the character of Kemp.

Not listened to the episode yet? You’ll find it here.

Language
We also talked in the podcast about how the faux-refined language used by all the characters is a big part of the social satire. The platitudes that Kath and Ed parrot are absorbed from common social parlance, adopted to project their middle-class aspirations.  But they are an artificial veneer that fails to plaster over the darker realities of their desires and behaviour. For example, when Kemp has been battered by Sloane, Kath plays it all down, saying he is upstairs “sleeping off the excitement”. She excuses Sloane his outburst on the basis that Kemp must have insulted him with “a bad word” – hardly a proportionate assessment. Kath’s working-class origins slip out from time to time, as with “I should change them curtains.” One critic described the polite language of the play as “like parquet over a volcano”, which is a lovely conceit for the social pretension that fails to cover the fiery chaos below.

Ed and Kath’s language is all about keeping up appearances, which is one of the themes of the play as Emma pointed out in our conversation. Sloane recognises this early on when he invents a genteel background for himself; how his parents were “respected. You know H.P. debts. Bridge. A little light gardening. The usual activities of a cultured community.” This is the social background that he thinks Kath will respect. Ed likewise talks frequently about his principles and protecting his reputation. His sister taking in a young lodger would reflect badly on him, for example. All of this posturing despite the implication that as a so-called businessman his activities have a strong whiff of the criminal.

Orton described the range of his language as a “collage” – of different sources and styles, combining colloquial phrases and social platitudes with more poetic, self-consciously writerly speech. Orton even cited the principle in Shakespeare’s language, saying that in Shakespeare “you have absolute realism and then you get high poetry, it’s just language. I think that you should use the language of your age and every bit of it.”

The language is most poetic in Sloane’s long speech telling how he ended up killing the photographer. It is a wonderful piece of storytelling, made more vivid by the details he includes, such as when he describes the conventional job he briefly had, complete with canteen facilities, a fortnight’s paid holiday and an annual staff dance, in the salubrious suburb of Twickenham, where “the air …was like wine”.  But the tale turns, of course. Sloane “loses his head” and kills the photographer in a blast of fury. The story contains all the seeds of Sloane’s character, as a social misfit, and a damaged and dangerous one at that. It is tempting to think that the lyricism of Sloane’s storytelling denotes that in this story he is telling the truth for once; at least the bit about killing the photographer. The real Sloane is revealed when he finds himself trapped by Kath’s threat to turn him in. He lashes out and hits Kath, urging Ed to “cut her throat”.  He no longer coats his language in civility, as the others do. He responds in the only way he has left, with force.