Theater: Stygian Fun House

Entertaining Mr. Sloane, by Joe Orton. The English theater is going through a sick-comedy phase. The Killing of Sister George, a smash hit now playing in London, centers on an elderly, cigar-smoking lesbian and her doll-baby secretary-companion. Whenever the younger woman offends the older, she is forced to atone for it. One penance is to drink a cup of the old lesbian’s bath water, another is to chew up one of her soggy cigar stumps.

The same appetizing flavors may be found in Mr. Sloane, which comes to Broadway from London’s West End. A tall blond young murderer takes lodgings with a middle-aged nymphomaniacal landlady. With lubricous zeal, she and her homosexual brother compete for the lodger’s favors. When this impetuous tenant kills cranky old “Dadda,” both brother and sister concoct a cover-up story about their father’s murder and sign an agreement to share the killer’s company.

In this unsavory fun house of horrors, Playwright Orton tries to refract he face of evil from the distorting mirrors of the humanly grotesque, but us talents run more to seamy documentation than satirical savagery. He can be witty: “To be present at the conception is all that a reasonable child can expect of his father.”

The trouble is that Playwright Orton did not set out to write a comedy of manners but a Stygian comedy of morals. Dipping his brush in the bile of Swift, he has managed to paint only an urban pastiche of Tobacco Road.