DAVID BAZEMORE PHOTOS
“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,” said L.P. Hartley in his opening lines to “The Go-Between.” Joe Orton’s “Loot,” which opened this past weekend at the Alhecama Theatre, is very foreign indeed. The farce makes traveling back to the Swinging London of the mid-1960s feel as long a trip as one to Oscar Wilde’s 19th-century Britain. As they say about traveling in new cars, your mileage may vary.
Orton was the enfant terrible of the new playwrights of his time, busting genres like Tom Stoppard but poking the establishment where it irritated them most. With his life cut short at age 34, we wonder where Orton might have gone — more political like Stoppard or Harold Pinter? Would he have been an ambassador of bad taste, like our filmmaker John Waters? Or just petered out?
