Celebrating the 50th anniversary of Joe Orton’s darkly comic masterpiece Loot, the Park Theatre’s forthcoming production of the play has announced initial casting news, with Calvin Demba, Sam Frenchum and Sinéad Matthews joining the company.
Calvin Demba (Evening Standard Emerging Talent Award nominee, The Red Lion, National Theatre) plays the role of Dennis, Sam Frenchum (Private Peaceful, Grantchester) plays Hal and award-winning Sinéad Matthews (Mrs Elvsted in Ivo van Hove’s Hedda Gabler, National Theatre) will play Fay. Additional cast members will be announced soon.
When it premiered five decades ago, Loot shocked and delighted audiences in equal measure and it scooped the Best Play of the Year Award in the 1967 Evening Standard Awards.
Loot – from the same producers as the recent sell-out hit The Boys in the Band – is directed by Michael Fentiman, whose credits include two acclaimed shows for the Royal Shakespeare Company as well as the critically-acclaimed hit, Raising Martha. It will run at London’s Park Theatre from 17 August – 24 September. It will then transfer to the Watermill Theatre, Newbury, Berkshire, from 28 September – 21 October.
The production celebrates three 50-year anniversaries: Joe Orton’s death on 9 August 1967; Loot’s first award-winning West End season at the Criterion Theatre; and the momentous, transformative passing in July 1967 of The Sexual Offences Act, which partially decriminalised homosexual acts in private between two men over the age of 21.
