Rare Joe Orton play revived at the Fringe
On 9 August 1967 Kenneth Halliwell bludgeoned his lover, playwright Joe Orton, to death. While Entertaining Mr Sloane and other plays established Orton's reputation as a creator of iconoclastic dark comedies, his earliest work, The Ruffian on the Stair, was soon forgotten. Now that classic opens in Edinburgh on 5th August, directed by self-confessed "trashcan dandy" Robert Wylie.
Wylie is a familiar figure on the streets of Edinburgh, for both his colourful clothing and his determined gait, which ruthlessly subdues his symptoms of Parkinson's. In 2021 he caught the attention of film-maker Saul Pankhurst and became the subject of Pankhurst's award-winning short documentary Unknown Hand.
Now Wylie has turned his attention to The Ruffian on the Stair. Mike and Joyce are a misfit couple in a run-down London flat. She has led a life on the streets; he drives a van which is frequently involved in fatal accidents. Into their lives comes eighteen-year-old Wilson, distraught by the death of his brother and in turns friendly, threatening and cajoling. The macabre erotic triangle can have only one ending.
Wylie sees many contemporary themes in the play, in particular the rightward turn of social attitudes and politics that both led to and resulted from Brexit. “Orton's play, sixty years later, reminds us there are still mindsets that, by the wieght of their democratic legitimacy, would seek to suffocate the value and vibrancy that difference can bring.”
The cast of three comprises Ollie Hiemann as Wilson - who will be onstage on his twenty-second birthday, coincidentally the anniversary of Orton's death - with Trevor Lord as Mike and Lois Williams as Joyce. All three regularly appear in productions around Edinburgh
The Ruffian on the Stair is produced by the Edinburgh Graduate Theatre Group, celebrating its platinum (70th) anniversary. EGTG's other production at the Fringe is the world premiere of Hilary Spiers' A Singular Deception, about the true-life story of Dr James Barry, a renowned army surgeon, who was revealed at his death at the age of seventy-six, to have been a woman.
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