Loot

Joint Artistic Director David Farr brings celebrated and controversial British playwright Joe Orton to Bristol Old Vic.

Mrs McLeavy is dead. Her psychotic nurse Fay may have had something to do with it. Meanwhile, Hal McLeavy and his boyfriend Dennis are struggling to hide their gains from a bank robbery. Hal’s mother’s coffin looks promising, but to make room for the loot, they have to put the body in the cupboard. Enter Inspector Truscott - cunningly disguised as a man from the Waterboard - looking for the thieves.

Irreverent and amoral, Joe Orton was the original sixties rebel. A failed actor, a defiant homosexual, and a convicted criminal for spoiling library books, he gained fame with his outrageous and viciously funny comedy Entertaining Mr Sloane. Loot soon followed. But the same year Loot won the Evening Standard Award for best play, Orton, aged 34, was beaten to death by his jealous lover Kenneth Halliwell in their London flat.

Frequently compared to Oscar Wilde, Orton’s craft with language and his instinct for its comic possibilities is nowhere better demonstrated than in Loot - an unstoppable tour de force of bad manners and gleeful attacks on religion, death, the police and sexual propriety. 

  The cast includes Clive Francis as Inspector Truscott, who has starred in a string of sitcoms including May to December, The Piglet Files as Major Morris Drummond and the 10%ers as Dominic Eden. Andrew Melville makes a welcome return to Bristol Old Vic as Mr McLeavy  He delighted audiences in The Comedy of Errors as Angelo and in A Midsummer Night’s Dream as the Mechanical, Snout. The cast is completed by Luke Jardine in the role of Dennis, Edward Hogg as Hal, Pooky Quesnel (Cardiac Arrest, Cold Feet) as Fay and Andrew Hinton Brown as P.C. Meadows.

 Tom Piper returns to Bristol Old Vic where he previously designed Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Other credits include the award-winning Henry VI for the RSC and The Birthday Party (National Theatre). Lighting designer Hartley T.A. Kemp and sound designer Jason Barnes’ most recent Bristol Old Vic productions include David Farr’s award-winning A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Comedy of Errors and Paradise Lost.

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