Word: lootings
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...LOOT. Black comedy has spawned black farce, and this is a saucy, irreverent, unremittingly amusing play that spews its lightly poisoned darts at freshly dead mothers, dutiful fathers, marriage, the Roman Catholic Church and police brutality. As a birdseed-brained flatfoot from Scotland Yard, George Rose pilfers the show...
...Kansas, he evoked the late William Allen White ("The more riots that come on college campuses, the better world for tomorrow"*) to show that someone past 30, or even 42, can indeed understand the alienation of the young. In Alabama, he condemned "anarchy" and "those who burn and loot"; in Tennessee, he lamented that "machine guns have fired at American children" (his aides said he was referring to the Detroit riot...
Black comedy has spawned black farce. Loot is a saucy, unremittingly funny play, spewing its deftly poisoned darts at freshly dead mothers, dutiful fathers (Liam Redmond), marriage, the Roman Catholic Church, police stupidity and police brutality. It suffers, as do all "nothing sacred" plays, from the suspicion that the playwright, the late Joe Orton, was shocking no one quite so much as himself...
...loot of the title is stolen money. Two homosexual pals, not immune to heterosexual byplay, have robbed a bank adjacent to a funeral parlor. One of the young men (James Hunter) works at the funeral parlor, and the mother of the other (Kenneth Cranham) has just died. The duo plan to skedaddle with the loot while the funeral is going on. At the same time, the dead mother's cynically efficient nurse (Carole Shelley), a sevenfold murderess of previous husbands, is precipitously wooing the bereaved widower. Into this den of agitated vipers steps Truscott (George Rose) of Scotland Yard...
...comment on life or death. Orton was a promising young English playwright (Entertaining Mr. Sloane) who was murdered by his friend (Kenneth Halliwell) last August (TIME, Sept. 15). Both his fate and some of his lines suggest that he had looked intimately into the abyss of existence. But Loot is not despairing, and even its shock effects are surprisingly good-natured...