Entertaining MR Sloane: Modern Plays

'This is a play that has dated no more than The Importance of Being Earnest.'
'Forty-five years after its London premiere, Joe Orton's Entertaining Mr Sloane comes up almost as fresh as a four-leaf clover. If there has been a funnier British comedy since Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, I cannot recall it.'
'Entertaining Mr Sloane retains its power to provoke and startle. It is a truly amoral piece, wild, witty and utterly heartless.'
'The play's language, with its sly double entendres and surreal subversiveness, remains distinctive, crying out for liberation from the restrictive social context of its original creation.'

Joe Orton (1933-1967) was an English playwright noted for his black comedies, which combine genteel dialogue with violent and shocking action. He delighted in shocking audiences by breaking taboos surrounding sexuality and death in conventionally structured 'black' farces involving epigrammatic dialogue and frenetic, convoluted plots. His plays include Entertaining Mr Sloane (1964), Loot (1965) and What the Butler Saw (1969).Emma Parker is based at the University of Leicester where she specialises in post-war British literature and contemporary fiction, particularly women's writing. Her research focuses on issues relating to gender and sexuality, feminism and queer theory. Dr Parker is also responsible for the Orton Archive at the University of Leicester.

Entertaining Mr Sloane remains as startling and subversive as the day it was written and it is now established as an essential part of the repertoire of the modern theatre.