Loot by Joe OrtonThe Central Concerns of the Play and How they are Dramatised

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Loot by Joe Orton

The Central Concerns of the Play and How they are Dramatised

Loot is a satire the normal moral conventions of behaviour in civilised, Western, society are turned upside down and the rules are broken down. This is epitomised by Truscott as a symbol of law and authority doing what he should not do. He does not uphold the law and he breaks the law in his investigation by deception, violence and dishonesty and corruption. Orton wrote the Play in the 160's which was a time of social re-evaluation and he attacks all the bastions of the Western world religion, law and order, love and marriage, and respect for the dead. He relies on dramatic irony and the collusion of the audience to understand the moral message hidden in the comedy of the Play.

The structure of the Play mirrors a detective story in many respects. A crime has been committed and a detective has to solve it. Truscott is a parody of the detective novel detective with his pipe and magnifying glass and pedantic language. In Act One the exchange between Truscott and Fay reads like an Agatha Christie or Sherlock Holmes novel with the totally unrealistic reading of clues

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TRUSCOTTMy methods of deduction can be learned by anyone with a keen eye and quick brain. When I shook your hand I felt a roughness on one of your wedding rings. A roughness I associate with powder burns and salt. The two together spell a gun and sea air. When found on a wedding ring only one solution is possible.

The characters are mainly stereotypes and the dialogue offers no insight to their feelings. They have no psychological depth and are merely over-simplified images used to comment on the institutions or conventions they represent. Fay is a nurse who kills rather than heals and is the archetypal hypocritical religious plaudit who uses Catholicism for her own ends. This is acknowledged by her comment on Mrs McLeavy believing in some of the Ten Commandments. Hal represents truth in that he cannot tell a lie and McLeavy represents innocence. Truscott is the law, justice and authority. Dennis is less easy to categorise as he is a truly dishonest and totally unsympathetic character.

Orton uses the audience's feelings to create a contrast. They presumably have decent moral feelings that react to the complete absence of feelings in the characters on the stage. One would expect certain emotions from a son whose mother has just died, but they are not present. McLeavy shows some regret, but the audience cannot take his sentiments seriously when he shows more feeling and interest in the flowers for the hearse than he does for his wife. This collusion with the audience is part of the technique and nature of satire, but Orton goes further by using as his material the subject of the death of a mother and wife while showing no respect for the dead and no grief. He dramatises the fact that he is dealing with the conventions associated with the situation and not with the emotions.

One of the central concerns of the Play is hypocrisy and this is neatly dramatised by the lack of emotion while following the conventions and formal rites of religion associated with death the pageantry of the funeral car procession, the flowers, the black dress (borrowed from the dead woman), the veil of mourning and the book of the Ten Commandments. Orton criticises almost every sacrosanct element of religion with his priest who cannot keep confidences after confession and his religious fanatic nurse who is a murderer. Orton is also questioning the matter of the truth. Hal is unable to tell a lie and he always speaks the truth, but he is not honest. Sometimes he is not believed and on other occasions he does not tell all

TRUSCOTTBut he is stupid. He's just admitted it. He must be the stupidest criminal in England. Unless - unless, unless he's the cleverest.

Orton uses simple dialogue and everyday vocabulary in a realistic way, however, it does not always say what it appears to and one of the frequent comedy techniques of his writing is verbal misunderstandings and double meanings. He uses dramatic irony in that the audience know of Hal and Dennis' guilt and of Fay's intentions. What is not clear until the end of the Play is that it is a form of double irony as it appears that Truscott knew more than we thought.

There is a consistent motif in the Play concerning deception and how things are seen. There are symbolic tools and non-verbal messages representing hiding and disguise, such as the coffin, the wardrobe and the screen and much of the comedy derives from hiding the body and the potential discovery. But this is more than a comic device, it is part of the satire and the attack on social norms and hypocrisy. It is dramatised especially effectively by the false eyes of the corpse being false and of the wrong colour. If eyes are taken to represent the windows to the soul, as well as being the most identifiable part of the body then this is still more shocking. The corpse is no longer a person as it has no innards (no heart) and no eyes and truly is just the 'dummy' that Hal and Fay pretend it is. Yet, this is how most bodies are buried. There is all the pomp and ceremony of the funeral and 'respect for the dead' over a body that has already been defiled and rendered neutral.

A repeated conflict in the Play is that between truth and honesty - how things appear and how things really are. In a Shakespearean play this would be represented by two different worlds, but Orton shows us the world beneath the surface in one world and asks us to reflect upon ourselves and our society. Orton is saying that the innocent and the 'meek' shall not inherit the earth and that the winners are those who know the rules. However, with the expert cut of his satire the audience knows that his message to us is that this is not how life should be. Although the title of the Play is "Loot" this does not seem to be a central concern of satire unless one takes it to mean that money and the desire for wealth have overturned all moral values, displacing respect for the dead as it displaces the body in the coffin.

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