Last night Owen and I stepped back in time and paid a call to an unmarried mother, a feral young thug and a right-wing gay businessman - oh and while we were there we watched an old man get kicked to death. Things weren't that much different in 1964 were they?

Yes you guessed... we were ENTERTAINING MR. SLOANE by Joe Orton at the Trafalgar Studios, my first visit there since it was converted from the old Whitehall Theatre. It was my second journey to Ortonland this year after seeing the slightly underwhelming production of LOOT at the Tricycle but Nick Bagnall's production was totally on the money, not just concentrating on the grotesquerie but on the underlying sense of fear and loathing.

I have never seen it on stage before but that's because I could never believe Beryl Reid's performance in the film could ever be equalled. However Imelda Staunton now shows there is room for more than one Kath in my mind. From the moment she shows the young, amoral Mr. Sloane (Matthew Horne, I am sure Orton would have relished the irony) the grotty living room of the house she shares with her aged, crotchety dada Kemp (Richard Bremmer), Staunton's Kath is almost trembling with lust at the thought of Sloane taking the place of her long-lost boyfriend who once got her pregnant.

Enter Ed (the wondrous Simon Paisley Day) her businessman brother who soon is also lusting over the young bit of rough. Ed has never forgiven his sister for seducing his best friend into bed all those years ago and doesn't want history to repeat itself. But soon there are two problems - Kemp remembers Sloane as the last person seen with his murdered boss and Kath announcing she's pregnant!

I was a little worried as with LOOT that Orton's play would have dated but not at all. Simple-minded women are still wanting babies as proof they are loved, there are still bad lads who will happily do anything to get by with absolutely no moral compass, OAPs are still getting murdered, immigrants are still the object of hatred... and men are still perving over lads that they can keep by flashing their money around.

The dank, dowdy atmosphere of Kemp's isolated house is wonderfully conveyed by Peter McKintosh's design with it's peeling wallpaper and cluttered surfaces and the atmosphere is also well conveyed with the cloying tones of Jim Reeves and - yay! - Kathy Kirby.

The only wrong note is probably the reason the production got on stage - "Gavin and Stacey"s Matthew Horne is totally one-note and wooden. He doesn't seem to be able to revel in the juicyness of Sloane's amoral soul and barks his lines up & out to the back row as if he has never been told how to project.

His woefulness is thrown into sharp relief by the quality of performance around him. Richard Bremmer turns Kemp into a character as crumbling and dessicated as any in Beckett and actually to give him credit, Horne does make his final confrontation with the feeble Kemp into a genuinely chilling scene.

Simon Paisley Day as Ed is a pure delight, he plays the role like a spiv Terry-Thomas!
Ramrod straight and buttoned down, chain-smoking as he bristles with anger and itchy with lust, he punctuates his speech with an odd laugh, half-snort, half-sneer. We never find out what Ed actually does, we only know he's 'in business' but Day suggests a world of clandestine meetings in new towns and dodgy dealings in anonymous travel-lodges.

His misogynist rants at his sister as he fights over the - soul? - of Mister Sloane are spat out with a disgusted venom that sizzles - needless to say they are screamingly funny. The remarkable thing is the way Day fleshes out Ed so you can feel his unhappiness at his dad not speaking to him for 20 years. An excellent performance.

As Simon Paisley Day makes Ed a 3 dimensional figure so does Imelda Staunton as Kath. Yes the outrageousness is still there with her unashamed flaunting in her see-through negligee to do her knitting and those killer lines are delivered with the timing of death:

"I've had the upbringing a nun would envy. Until the age of fifteen I was more familiar with Africa than my own body."

But she also delved deeper than caricature to find moments that were genuinely touching as when Ed brusquely tells her he burnt her only photo & letter from her long-dead lover and when she asserts herself against Ed to lay claim to half of Sloane's life.

But above all it was a fantastic comedy performance, full of invention and "business" and she can deliver the great Orton dialogue to perfection - that dialogue that usually is deliberately exaggerated, the characters using 'refined' phraseology to cover the tawdriness of their situation or surroundings, always trying to impress an unseen world.