Word: mccleavey
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...McCleavey's body is on display in the parlor of her house, until her son Hal and his friend the undertaker Dennis, who have just stolen a pile of "loot," decide to hide her corpse in a cabinet and to bury in her coffin, with full Roman Catholic death rites, the money they want to hide. Truscott, a Scotland Yard sleuth on the trail of Fay, a nurse who has poisoned Mrs. McCleavey and killed seven successive husbands in one decade, appears on the scene, calls himself the Water Commissioner Inspector, and ferrets out clues about Mrs. McCleavey's death...
...intelligence performance, but I single out that character for special attention because Truscott stands for one of many loose ends which Orton failed to tie together in writing this play, and perhaps the most interesting one-his satirical, warped vision of bureaucratic authority. Truscott tyrannizes the old widower Mr. McCleavey in his own home by searching where and when he pleases, and threatening to cut off the water supply. When Anthony Mowbray, heavily made up as the old McCleavey, asks Truscott by what right he does all this, Russo lifts his eyes with a proud glisten of authority and tells...
...real star of the evening was Mrs. McCleavey's shrouded corpse, and its accoutrements-her grayish marble eyes, her false teeth, her Bingo Society "floral tribute." Maybe if we all had the chance to tear the dead apart and turn them upside down in locked cabinets and carry their stiff corpses around in our arms as the characters in Loot do, we might all find release from the hold of death in our minds. For as objects, in silk-lined strong-boxes, our bodies, as Orton sees them, are interchangeable and not so much contemptible as laughable. Joe Orton...
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