“Chaos, Camp and Comedy: Joe Orton’s Loot Will Blow Your Mind at the Queen’s Theatre”

By Ruth Kettle-Frisby – Guest Writer and Community Activist

Ruth is passionate about fostering positive change within the local community and regularly contributes insights and stories to The Havering Daily.

Loot is a play that takes no prisoners. Shocking in its time, this intricately performed production is scandalously entertaining.

This wonderfully directed production of Loot is a triumph of light and shade. Simply and arrestingly staged, an oversized garish cross in Vegas lights looms large behind an open coffin, revealing subtle suggestions of the deceased within. It isn’t long before these familiar peaks outlining a human form are indelicately manhandled into a closet.

Indeed, closeted gallows humour reigns supreme in this unapologetically camp, deliciously sardonic, and riotously entertaining production of Joe Orton’s intricately written nightmare. 

Orton himself – an expertly cutting satirist – was bludgeoned to death in his mid-thirties by his boyfriend, darkly blurring intangible boundaries between terrifying artistic absurdity and real-life tragedy.

Loot leaves no prisoners and goes straight for the jugular of the corrupt establishment, ruthlessly dismantling the pillars of civilisation to leave nothing behind in the rubble but cold nihilism. It plays havoc with the socially constructed norms that govern our reactions to powerful themes of death, sexuality and authority. 

Even as hopelessness creeps in until the last grains of sanity, order and morality fall through the hour glass, the audience is consistently reduced to cackling tears of laughter.  While its dark-humoured quips – pregnant with deeply structural prejudices – land with lighter impact on today’s audience, the play’s essence is masterfully preserved. To the point of no return, it really is nothing short of Kafkaesque. 

Tanya-Loretta Dee, Simon Startin, Samuel Armfield, Omar Bynon and Tom Mangan are all brilliantly effective in their own right. Not only that, but each character creates an onstage chemistry that is driven forwards and tangled into knots by the tremendous performance of Truscott – a sort of inverted Inspector Goole – captured perfectly by Nicholas Karimi, who holds the warped logic of the narrative together with irony, hilarity and style.

This outstanding production of Loot is a must-see, so grab yourself a ticket before the closing performance on March 7!

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