Joe Orton’s play was awarded the London Critic Award for the best play of 1964.
John Russel Taylor considers it to be ‘the Arsenic and Old Lace, 1964 model.’
The Kemp family, with their solitary house in the middle of a rubbish dump, consists of Kath, a super-annuated baby-doll nymphomaniac; her brother Ed, a solid businessman homosexual with a taste for body buliders who drops in from time to time, and Dadda, a nasty-tempered old man tottering on the edge of a grave. Into this cosy den of suburban iniquity wanders the ‘smooth-skinned’ Mr Slone whom we gather before long to be a murderer, possibly psychotic, but anyway on the loose and more than a little sinister.
‘…the author has flashes of wit which at best can match Oscar Wilde’ BAMBER GASCOIGNE.
‘Mr Orton is one of those rare dramatists who create their own idiom. A new generation is treading on the heels of those grand old men of the fifties, Harold Pinter and John Osborne’ ALAN BRIEN.
‘Beautifully constructed play that develops organically from start to finish, has a most elegant shade and is full of cunningly-sprung surprises- hilariously funny’ FINANCIAL TIMES