Brian Foyster, Sile Bermingham and Reed Michael Campbell in Joe Orton's The Ruffian on the Stair  at the Los Angeles LGBT Center’s Davidson/Valentini Theatre. (Photo by Noah Torjesen)
Brian Foyster, Sile Bermingham and Reed Michael Campbell in Joe Orton’s The Ruffian on the Stair at the Los Angeles LGBT Center’s Davidson/Valentini Theatre. (Photo by Noah Torjesen)

The Ruffian on the Stair

Reviewed by Deborah Klugman
Hicks Street Productions at the LGBT Center
Through July 28

Joe Orton was only 34 when he was bludgeoned to death by Kennegth Halliwell, his jealous lover and one-time writing partner. Halliwell envied Orton’s newfound celebrity as an up-and-coming playwright, launched after the BBC aired The Ruffian on the Stair as a radio play in 1964. The play was based on an unfinished novel, The Boy Hairdresser, that Orton and Halliwell had collaborated on. Orton later rewrote this one-act for the stage, and it was produced as a part of a double bill in the year preceding his gruesome murder in 1967.

As preface to Ruffian, he appropriated the first verse of a poem by W.E. Henley:

Madam Life’s a piece in bloom,
Death goes dogging everywhere:
She’s the tenant of the room,
He’s the ruffian on the stair

Set in London, the play is a three-hander that takes place in the shabby working-class digs of middle-aged couple Mike (Brian Foyster) and Joyce (Sile Bermingham). Mike is a small-time hood, a hitman whose most recent killing involved mowing a guy down with a van. His sexual predilections to swing-both-ways are hinted at when he places a flower on his lapel and tells Joyce that he’s meeting a man in a toilet. (She doesn’t get it.) But these plans for a tryst don’t prevent him from evoking the eternally noxious double-standard — threatening, before he leaves, to kill Joyce if she ever messed around, even though she’s done nothing to suggest that she might or would.

Soon after Mike departs, an intimidating stranger (Reed Michael Campbell) shows up, calling himself Wilson and claiming he’s come for the (non-existent) room they have to let. Joyce’s unease turns to terror after Wilson taunts her and points out how easy it would be to murder her — though he exits without causing her bodily harm. When Mike returns, she tells him of Wilson’s visit and asks for his protection, but Mike cavalierly dismisses her fears, and when he does meet Wilson, he takes sides against her.

As a satirist, Orton used his writing to go after numerous British institutions and human behaviors; here he renders judgment on the misogyny and hypocrisy of the working-class British male — and secondarily on the callousness of humanity in general. Done right, the play should sizzle with repressed homosexual tension and secrets begging to be revealed; Joyce’s panic when threatened by Wilson should be palpable, and her disquiet at the unprovoked belligerence of her mate should be contagious. The disturbing climax is meant to be bizarre and bewildering.

But none of the above transpires in this disappointing extension of a Hollywood Fringe Festival production rather negligently directed by Mike Kemble. Iffy dialects aside (they are distracting enough), two of the three actors — Foyster and Campbell — seem to be operating entirely without subtext. Foyster appears content to utter his lines in a cryptic manner and leave it at that, while Campbell’s intruder lacks menace, so there is absolutely no suspense to his scene with Joyce or his eventual mano-a-mano confrontation with Mike. Bermingham is more successful projecting Joyce’s fear, but there’s also much about the character that is left unexplored.

There are also some odd and/or careless aspects of the staging, such as having Wilson engage in a conversation while obscured by a curtain, with only his hands visible. (He’s supposed to be at the door but why not bring him on stage?) Kemble’s maneuvering of the actors does not always maximize the drama. The serving of tea is nowhere near how it’s done in Britain (or how it used to be done in the 1960s anyway); it’s one of many small testaments to the production’s untidiness. Most damning is the dramatic denouement, which is played minus requisite props, thus rendering the climax completely unconvincing — as if this performance were an early rehearsal instead of a bid for an audience’s heedful attention.

What does work is Foyster’s set design, appropriately dingy and detailed and spot-on in relaying the grim claustrophobia of these characters’ lives.

The Los Angeles LGBT Center’s Davidson/Valentini Theatre, 1125 N. McCadden Place, Hollywood; Thurs., 7/18 & 7/25, 8 p.m.; Sat., 7/13 & 7/27, 8 p.m.; Sun., 7/14, 7/21 & 7/28, 7 p.m.; through Jul. 28; www.lalgbtcenter.org/theatre or (323) 860-7300. Running time: approximately 55 minutes with no intermission.