Funny Money: Loot Then and Now

Paul McCartney once told Joe Orton that he got nothing from theatre but ‘a sore arse.’ Loot was different: ‘the only play he hadn’t wanted to leave before the end.’ Many people did walk out before the end, however, not bored but outraged at what they deemed a ‘disgusting’ play. Writing in the midst of the ‘Swinging Sixties’, working-class Orton was part of an irreverent new counterculture that rebelled against the Establishment. His outlandish black comedy lampoons bourgeois ideals of decency and respectability with its breezy brutality and farcical mishandling of an undressed female corpse, whose glass eye and false teeth are passed around ‘like nuts at Christmas’. The controversy caused by Orton’s ‘comedy of horrors’ prompted one of the most memorable Times headlines of all time: ‘Bournemouth Old Ladies Shocked.’