Prick Up Your Ears by John Lahr

Author:John Lahr
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media

5

SCANDALOUS SURVIVAL

One does not kill by anger but by laughter.

Come, let us kill the Spirit of Gravity.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

Killing is one of the forms of our wandering mourning…

Rainer Maria Rilke

THE TRANSITION BETWEEN Entertaining Mr Sloane and Loot was The Good and Faithful Servant, completed in June 1964 and produced on Rediffusion Television in April 1967. In this poignant and bitter one-act play, Buchanan—a commissionaire—is retiring after fifty years of service. Buchanan has lost an arm on the job. Like the company’s gifts of a clock and a toaster, his body is on the verge of breakdown. When he visits a lady friend on the evening of his retirement, she’s shocked at the sight of a whole man:

EDITH. Your arms! Where has the extra one come from?

BUCHANAN. It’s false.

EDITH. Thank God for that. I like to know where I stand in relation to the number of limbs a man has.

Orton concentrates his irony on the slavish belief in industrial routine. At Buchanan’s first get-together of ex-employees in the company’s recreation centre, he talks to another old man—an exchange which maps the bleak horizon of their lives:

OLD MAN. I was almost mentioned in a well-known sporting periodical once.

BUCHANAN. I never got as far as that…

Later, Buchanan reminds the Old Man: ‘I worked here. I was on the main entrance…’ But Buchanan’s life and his presence amount to nothing. ‘Nobody knows me’, he says to himself. ‘They’ve never seen me before.’ In the foreground, the shrewish director of activities, Mrs Vealfoy, claps her hands and forces them into recreation: ‘We’re going to run through all the songs with “Happy” in them…’ Buchanan registers his gradual disenchantment by finally smashing his retirement gifts with a hammer. At the finale, as his new wife, Edith, chats to him about a holiday, Buchanan sits silently in bed, tearfully aware of his wasted life. He dies as she gossips about a forthcoming company dance, concluding: ‘we have so much to be thankful for’.

Despite the seething disgust in The Good and Faithful Servant the blast of its irony was muted by the naturalistic format. Melodrama has a comforting predictability and is too tame for comic devastation. A survivor, Orton was compelled to exhibit his mastery of the dead world that The Good and Faithful Servant documented in a style as extreme as his success. The threat of anonymity, the suffocating memory of his upbringing and literary failures were symbolic deaths from which Orton now drew power for life. With success, he now embarked on a play whose manic laughter registered the weirdness of his scandalous survival.

Loot is about scandalous survivors: Fay, the predatory nurse with designs on McLeavy’s money; Hal and Dennis, lovers and robbers; and the psychopathic detective Truscott pursuing his omnipotent fantasies first in crime-solving and then in larceny. ‘I fancy myself as a ghoul’, Hal says in a line cut from the first draft of Loot, after tipping his mother’s corpse out of her coffin to bury stolen money. The joke defines a

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