Ruffian on the Stair
By Joe Orton

Oxford Playhouse, Tue 30th Jan - Sat 3rd Feb 2001

You may have seen the posters for The Ruffian on the Stair - a goldfish inside a condom? The same goldfish lies suspiciously still in his bowl for most of this short one scene play. But it's about the only thing that does stay still. Joe Orton's first play, written in 1963, revolves around the squalid lives of Mike (Mike Lovatt), Joyce, his live-in girlfriend (Katherine Rushton), and 'the Ruffian', Wilson (Rob Riddell). Being Orton's first play, and least well known, it could be seen as a breeding ground for the later blackly satirical writing which was to earn him the title of "the Oscar Wilde of welfare state gentry". Not quite so startling as his other work, but not without some little shining gems (the opening line being a good example: "I'm to be at King's Cross station at eleven. I'm meeting a man in the toilets"). Despite all its clever talk, the play is basically about the fear of solitude and rejection amidst the everyday activities of sexual indecency and murder.

The male cast do well to convey a sense of near brutal misogyny at times, buffered by the very empathically played Joyce. Joyce is an ex-prostitute who veers from intense bravery to scary levels of stupidity, and who, despite the very male focus of the play actually utters the majority of the hilarious lines. Mr. Lovatt and Mr. Riddell seemed slightly less able than Ms. Rushton to ignore the raucous audience, but then we were virtually sitting on their knees in the tiny arena. Orton wrote of The Ruffian that all pauses should be natural and that "pace, pace, pace" was important. At times, the pace was slightly too slow, but when it picked up there was many a brilliant comical moment. The music, written for the play by Dominic de Cogan, was suitably lively and initially captured the clown-like quality of Orton's writing.

Apparently the set should "produce a feeling of familiarity - yet with an odd dislocation". I don't know if it was the set so much, but I certainly left the theatre not knowing whether I actually found The Ruffian amusing or tragic, or whether I felt pity or anger towards the characters. Pretty good work for the production of a play written by an "enemy of order". And you'll have to see what happens to the goldfish at the end..

Angharad Rudkin , 31 / 1 / 01