Word: erpingham
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...With madness, as with vomit, it's the passer-by who receives the inconvenience," says a character in Joe Orton's one-act satire The Erpingham Camp. No doubt about it, playwright Joe Orton was a great, corrosive farcist. With such devilish lines, he's been pricking up everyone's ears for the past two decades, and it's been audiences who've felt the inconvenience of his caustic, mad wit. He was so talented, even the cheeky, musical imps of the perverse, The Beatles, had Orton working on an original screenplay when he was bludgeoned to death...
...produced in America. There was a successful run of Loot off-Broadway this past year, and his acclaimed masterpiece, What the Butler Saw, has enjoyed stage-time in Harvard's own Loeb Ex and in New Hampshire. Now Bostonians can delight in a short one-act Orton gem, The Erpingham Camp, done with great energy and skill by Harvard/Radcliffe Summer Theatre...
...Erpingham Camp is a biting comic-book political satire where the characters have no character, and are hardly more than grotesques. Orton populates his play with social types who cover the entire political spectrum. What makes Orton's satire so savage is that his grotesques manage to seem "real." That "real" people can be the way Orton portrays them is both disturbing and awfully hard to accept...
...Erpingham (John Claflin) is the name of the director of a chain of British holiday camps, an upper crust, uptight version of Club Med. He is the Great Oppressor/Dictator/Imperialist, demanding religiously fanatic devotion and obeisance from his workers and campers while envisioning a world-spanding empire of holiday camps. He declares off-handedly that his campers don't have rights, only privileges--even food is a privilege...