Loot

Black comedy has spawned black farce. Loot is a saucy, unremittingly funny play, spewing its deftly poisoned darts at freshly dead mothers, dutiful fathers (Liam Redmond), marriage, the Roman Catholic Church, police stupidity and police brutality. It suffers, as do all "nothing sacred" plays, from the suspicion that the playwright, the late Joe Orton, was shocking no one quite so much as himself.

The loot of the title is stolen money. Two homosexual pals, not immune to heterosexual byplay, have robbed a bank adjacent to a funeral parlor. One of the young men (James Hunter) works at the funeral parlor, and the mother of the other (Kenneth Cranham) has just died. The duo plan to skedaddle with the loot while the funeral is going on. At the same time, the dead mother's cynically efficient nurse (Carole Shelley), a sevenfold murderess of previous husbands, is precipitously wooing the bereaved widower. Into this den of agitated vipers steps Truscott (George Rose) of Scotland Yard. Disguised as an employee of the water board in order to bypass certain laws that confine the limits of police activity, Truscott is the eternal flatfoot. He has an infallible gift for minute circumstantial deduction, such as the source of burn stains on a wedding ring, but he is oblivious to a fact as stark and staring as a trussed-up corpse lying on a bed. Rose plays this ripe role with unflappable comic finesse.

A good part of the evening is pure vaudevillian slapstick--coffin-lid play, unscheduled entrances, involuntary exits, stashing the money where the corpse was and vice versa. The macabre jocularity involves such bits of business as tossing the dead mother's dentures across the room as casually as a pack of cigarettes. All of this demands the split-second timing of a Feydeau farce, and unfortunately Director Derek Gold-by is no Mike Nichols.

Goldby lets the pace stall at moments to let the dialogue sink in, as if Orton had some comment to make on life, instead of mocking all comment on life or death. Orton was a promising young English playwright (Entertaining Mr. Sloane) who was murdered by his friend (Kenneth Halliwell) last August (TIME, Sept. 15). Both his fate and some of his lines suggest that he had looked intimately into the abyss of existence. But Loot is not despairing, and even its shock effects are surprisingly good-natured.

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