There’s something quite subversive about Nadia Fall kicking off her tenure as Young Vic artistic director with Joe Orton’s debut play, a black comedy from 1964 full of twisted games of sex and class which tells the story of a young lodger being pulled between his sex-starved landlady and her closeted brother. Orton’s nose for our baser natures and the unrelenting rhythm of his dialogue helped to rip away the masks of primness and false civility that he saw in the country around him, and the play outraged some critics as much as it delighted others.
Plenty to chew on in today’s world then - sexuality and prudishness, violence and hypocrisy - and it’s even got a stage debut from Rizzle Kicks’s Jordan Stephens. Some great, truth-telling modern revival? Well no. The trouble is, the play isn’t outrageous, not in Fall’s production. Lines that should be dripping with menace are thrown away like passing the time of day. Vicious, innuendo-laden jokes are swallowed, the sex reduced to seaside postcard levels of cheekiness.
