Show Header Joe Orton’s – Entertaining Mr Sloane

Joe Orton’s – Entertaining Mr Sloane

What happens when everyone wants the same person?

Coming – 2027/2028

Thomas Hopkins Productions is developing a bold new stage production of Joe Orton’s groundbreaking masterpiece, Entertaining Mr Sloane.

More than sixty years after it shocked Britain, Entertaining Mr Sloane feels less like a classic and more like a warning. A play about power disguised as desire. About sexuality disguised as respectability. About people performing versions of themselves simply to survive. Long before these conversations became part of everyday culture, Joe Orton was already writing about them with extraordinary wit, intelligence and fearless originality.

Darkly funny, provocative and endlessly entertaining, Orton’s work dismantles ideas of class, gender, queerness, morality and identity, exposing the contradictions that exist beneath the surface of polite society. It remains one of the most influential and uncompromising works in the British theatrical canon, speaking to audiences today with the same urgency and irreverence that made it revolutionary in 1964.

For producer Thomas Hopkins, bringing Entertaining Mr Sloane to the stage has been a long held ambition.

"For more than twenty years, I have wanted to produce Entertaining Mr Sloane. Not simply because it is one of the greatest British plays ever written, but because it still has the power to provoke, seduce and surprise. Joe Orton was the original disruptor. Fearless in his writing and uncompromising in his vision, he challenged ideas of class, sexuality, gender, power and respectability decades before the rest of society caught up. Great theatre should never feel safe. It should entertain, unsettle and start conversations that continue long after the curtain falls. That is exactly what Orton achieved, and with this production we hope to honour his extraordinary legacy while introducing one of Britain's greatest plays to a new generation of audiences, alongside those returning to rediscover it through a fresh contemporary lens." Thomas Hopkins

By
Joe Orton

Producer
Thomas Hopkins

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