Kenneth Halliwell. Loot collage poster. 1965.

• _{Play title: Loot}  
• _{Author: Joe Orton} 
• _{First performed: 1965}  
• _{Page count: 84} 

Summary 

Joe Orton’s play Loot is best classified under the genre of farce. In this work, Orton pokes fun at the establishment in general but takes particular aim at Catholicism and the police force.

The action of the play revolves around two main events: the recent death of Mrs McLeavy and the robbery of a bank next to an undertaker’s premises. All the action of the play occurs on the day of Mrs McLeavy’s funeral. Among the character types caricatured, are the diligent police inspector, Truscott, and the benevolent nurse, Miss McMahon. The plot of the drama deals with Truscott’s humorously slow path to discovering the identity of the bank robbers, as well as the unravelling of the true cause of Mrs McLeavy’s death. The absurdly intertwined relationships of the characters add greatly to the comedy. For example, the widower Mr McLeavy is depicted as the honest Everyman while his son Hal is romantically involved with the undertaker’s driver named Dennis who proposes to Nurse McMahon who herself has already proposed to Mr McLeavy on the day of his wife’s funeral (phew!). The ending, unsurprisingly, defies all normal expectations.

Ways to access the text: listening/reading 

There is a free audiobook version of the play available on the Internet Archive, which has a running time of 1hr and 24mins. A simple internet search for “Joe Orton’s Loot – Internet Archive” will find this audiobook. This is a professional production that was originally aired on BBC Radio 3. 

If you would like to read the text then it is available on the Open Library Internet Archive, however, registration is needed (no payment details required). 

Why listen to/read Loot? 

_{Likeable scoundrels} 

In Loot, the appearance of utter propriety is essential to getting away with murder, so to speak. Many of the chief characters take advantage of this fact while simultaneously exposing themselves as notorious hypocrites. What makes characters like Fay (nurse McMahon) and Inspector Jim Truscott quite likeable, even though they are obvious scoundrels, is that they are wonderfully charismatic villains. These characters present themselves as paragons of society. However, there is a constant and quite amusing jarring effect between what they are saying and what mischievous deeds they are actually conducting. Their rhetoric is captivating, not least because they exhibit a brash confidence and a knowledge of how the world really works, and therefore, they know how to win. In contrast, Orton sets up Mr McLeavy as the honest man who is predictably slavish to the demands of conventional society and whose views seem to be freshly lifted from the newspaper headlines of the day. Orton delights in presenting a world of play where Machiavellian types like Nurse McMahon indulge their immoral tastes, and an audience is understandably seduced by such wanton freedom.    

_{Undermining the pillars of society (with a laugh)}   

Orton’s play, while making his audience laugh, also cleverly undermines the pillars of conventional society. The genre of farce, a subgenre of comedy, is normally focused solely on eliciting hearty laughs from an audience through the depiction of caricatures of recognizable types in absurd situations. While Orton does indeed stick to these guidelines regarding characters and situations, and he certainly provides much humour, he also invests his work with a depth of meaning. The playwright’s sharp intellect is evident in the very witty dialogue. It is also his deliberate intention to critique, even lambast, certain aspects of English society that would still have been considered sacrosanct in the mid-nineteen sixties. The pillars of society in question are law enforcement, religion, and the model citizen. Through observing the characters of Truscott, Miss McMahon, and Mr McLeavy, we grow to suspect that society does not function as smoothly as normally presumed, and that equitable outcomes are often the exception rather than the rule. Orton’s own spell in jail for defacing library books evidently led to his more jaundiced view of society, but this political edge adds rather than detracts from the comedy. 

Post-reading discussion/interpretation 

_{Confronting taboo subjects}  

Loot was first performed in 1965. It is all too easy, especially from a modern reader’s standpoint, to overlook the restrictive society in which Orton worked. The nineteen sixties was a decade of immense societal change in England, and only by viewing Orton’s play against the backdrop of such major changes can one appreciate his daring. For example, Loot deals quite openly with sex; yet in England, it was not until 1967 that homosexuality was decriminalized, abortion became legal, and the Family Planning Act made contraception readily available. A modern reader may enjoy Loot as a rip-roaring farce, but the work does have a distinct vein of black humour that shows Orton’s societal critique and gives his humour some bite. Therefore, the humour is never just whimsical but gains its potency from satirizing an old society that Orton openly challenges. Orton was very much an outsider, and he believed that his own imprisonment for defacing library books, obviously a harsh sentence, was really due to his queer identity. The playwright uses the topics of sex, Catholicism, and death as vehicles to challenge the status quo of English society: a society that was still very classist, conventional, and prudish in the nineteen sixties.

Sexual escapades are a familiar part of farce, yet Orton is making a bold statement by putting sex front and centre for the audience. Loot has heterosexual, bisexual and homosexual characters along with references to child prostitution, rape, necrophilia, and even sex with a doll. In the story, Hal is homosexual and plans to flee to Portugal with his lover, Dennis, a bisexual character who unashamedly sleeps with both Hal and Fay. Nurse McMahon has sex with both Mr McLeavy (the unzipped dress incident) and Dennis, and she finally decides on her future husband based on the size of his bank balance. Although these sexual relations would have been quite controversial in the era of the play’s publication, Orton transgresses much further. For instance, Hal plans to treat Dennis to some fun at a brothel that is run by three Pakistani children! There is also a reference to Hal being present when Dennis apparently raped Pauline Chung. These assorted references to sordid events, reflective of the underbelly of society, are still presented humorously because they are cushioned in the fantasy land of on-stage, theatrical farce. However, Orton is undoubtedly using things that really happen in society in his black humour. He elicits laughter from an audience because there is a sharp edge to the play’s frivolity, and it is the creation of this slight uneasiness that further fuels the laughter. 

   

Regarding religion, Orton ridicules Catholicism as he perceives it to be part of the establishment and therefore inherently hypocritical. Fay quips about the police, “God works for them. They have Him in their pockets.” As an authoritarian institution, the church is seen as a legitimate target. Orton makes exceptional comedic capital from his offensive on Catholicism because it is such a prescriptive, rule-laden faith. The McLeavy family are depicted as Catholics as is Nurse McMahon. While both surnames sound Irish, McMahon undoubtedly is, and therefore Orton presents this homicidal nurse as someone with a good, Irish-Catholic background. The character of Fay is a superb creation of Orton’s: a woman whose staggering hypocrisy reflects negatively on the teachings of the church she represents. For instance, she wears a crucifix and a wedding ring, but both bear the physical marks of a dispute with a previous husband whom she shot dead. As Truscott says to her after recounting the deaths of her seven husbands – “there’s something seriously wrong with your approach to marriage.” Like any good Catholic, Fay cannot divorce or leave a husband – they must die before she can move on! In another wonderfully comic moment, Fay refuses to return the money to Mr McLeavy that she previously stole from Mrs McLeavy. Instead, she insists that they should marry to avoid scandal. When Dennis reveals to Hal that he had sex with Fay, proving that she is a blemished Catholic, he wryly adds that it happened under her bedroom picture of the Sacred Heart. Orton takes aim at religious authority because just like state authority, it presumes to dictate how people should live. Fay’s lifestyle serves to expose church teachings as impotent and ultimately just tools of hypocrisy. Orton attacks the Catholic Church more venomously than any of the other pillars of society. One prime example is when Hal proposes a name for his future brothel – “consummatum est.” These were the last words of Jesus on the cross, which translate as “it is finished.” Orton’s wordplay involves the English word ‘consummation’ meaning to have sex in a relationship, and the literal translation of the quote, which expresses the relief that something is over. In other words, Orton is using a biblical quote to express an ejaculatory fantasy!

Finally, regarding death, Orton depicts a corpse being continually disrespected. He additionally shows how the venerated object in the coffin, namely Mrs McLeavy’s corpse, may be replaced with bundles of money. This tactic, ostensibly necessary for the plot’s various twists and turns, cleverly highlights the themes of selfishness and greed. Mrs McLeavy’s son Hal is the epitome of a dysfunctional youth: a lad who first refuses to attend his mother’s funeral as it would upset him but who later plans to dispose of her body in a mine shaft or a swamp. These scenes clearly signal that money, not familial bonds, is the ultimate motivation in life. Even Truscott states that “stealing public money is a crime more serious than murder.” When the detective finally discovers the stash of five-pound notes hidden in the coffin, he protests, saying, “Twenty thousand tiaras and twenty thousand smiles buried alive!” The power of the Queen’s image, duplicated on so many banknotes, serves to erase the image of poor, insignificant Mrs McLeavy. However, Orton does not totally abandon the taboo of the dead body, which is itself quite potent. For example, the stripping of Hal’s mother leads to what he calls a “Freudian nightmare.” Furthermore, the body is constantly being moved about the place. The corpse is even dressed in a mattress cover, which makes it resemble a mummy/dummy, and bits of the body get lost such as an eyeball. All these episodes create a scene of profound black humour. Orton anticipates some audience unease during the ‘corpse scenes,’ so he counteracts this reaction by having Mr McLeavy make outrageously comical enquiries about what happened at the funeral parlour when the adjoining bank was robbed. Mr McLeavy solemnly questions Dennis, “Was your chapel of rest defiled?” and upon receiving a negative response, he quizzes further by asking “Human remains weren’t outraged?” The character’s perverse desire to be shocked is identified by Orton as a desire specific to genteel, middle-class people who need it to feel righteous. Most likely, many such people were in the audience of Orton’s play. As Hal says of his father, and by extension the older generation of English people – “his generation takes a delight in being outraged.”

What Orton achieves through his blackly humorous treatment of the topics of sex, Catholicism, and death, is primarily a dismantling of the old guard. He is openly challenging the norms of society. Orton, the enfant terrible of the nineteen-sixties theatrical world, steamrollers through the conventions of what is in good taste and encapsulates his message in a farce.

_{The police force} 

Some commentators consider Jim Truscott to be a parody of Sherlock Holmes or at least of detective fiction in general. Truscott certainly represents a police force that Orton obviously did not respect. Yet Truscott is one of the most engaging characters in the play. This is a man who gives police suspects rabbit punches (blows to the back of the head), assaults them until they are in tears on the floor, and is a smiling cat-kicker to boot. In response, one readily laughs due to the outrageous caricature of the police force. Hilarity is also induced by Orton’s use of dramatic irony. For instance, when Mr McLeavy is confused because a Water Board employee is interrogating him. Another source of amusement is the policeman’s utter disbelief at the gullible nature of the public in general. Mr McLeavy confidently states that the police are there to protect ordinary people, but Truscott responds, “I don’t know where you pick up these slogans, sir. You must read them on hoardings.” Orton establishes a particularly important differentiation in the play between the older and younger generations. People like Mr McLeavy and Dennis’ father accept Truscott’s various false explanations that he is with the Sanitary People or Water Board, whereas the younger generation like Hal, Dennis, and Fay immediately recognise Truscott’s underhand methods. The older generation still retains faith in the integrity of the system including public services, the police, the church, and the law. The younger generation is rebellious, savvy, and unwilling to accept any transgression of their rights. Orton’s message is that people’s compliance with authority, indeed docility of any kind, is merely a sign of stupidity.    

Even though Truscott is what is traditionally termed a ‘bent copper,’ he is nonetheless wholly inadequate in his investigative methods. There are several scenes where, despite the detective’s blatantly unethical behaviour and egregious rule-bending, he is still unable to decipher the clues that lie in front of him. For example, Mrs McLeavy’s eye puzzles the detective for an inordinate period of time before he pulls a mini magnifying glass from his pocket to have an even closer look. Orton presents his audience with a representative specimen of English law enforcement who is too crooked to follow the rule of law and too obtuse to achieve any results – a truly terrifying and hilarious depiction. If one needs a clear indictment of how the English system worked then Truscott’s words to a concerned Mr McLeavy provide it, – “it’s for your own good that authority behaves in this seemingly alarming way.” In the end, Truscott is willing to maintain his silence about the crimes of murder and bank robbery in exchange for twenty-five percent of the criminal proceeds. In a superb final twist, the most law-abiding person, Mr McLeavy, who selflessly helped Truscott with the investigation, is the one to be led away in handcuffs. Orton depicts a topsy-turvy world where abiding by the rules leads to hilarious consequences.

Works Cited

Orton, Joe. Loot. Methuen Drama, 1967.