Rats in Pants!

The first project of the semester was to create a stage set based on a play we picked out of a hat. I got Entertaining Mr Sloane which is the first play by Joe Orton. Joe Orton had an amazingly interesting life which sadly was cut quite short. He and his partner were jailed for defacing library books by collaging new and sometimes explicit book jackets for books they found to be pointless and boring. They also ripped out pages of works of art to wallpaper their flat. In 1967 his partner murdered him and then committed suicide.

The play is wild. A young man (Sloane) moves into a middle aged woman's flat as her lodger and the brother disapproves while the father recognises him as the boy who murdered his boss. Quickly the woman tries it on with Sloane and not long after the straight laced brother also starts a relationship with him. Soon Sloane murders the father and Kath is pregnant and it ends with the brother and sister agreeing to share Sloane on a time share kind of basis. (WILD!)

I initially struggled a lot with how to change up the concept as the whole play is set in one woman's living room, but as it is a farce there was a lot of room to change things up. I ended up deciding to have rats living in a skip (the house in the play is part of an abandoned housing project by a dump yard) and once I had that sorted (it took quite a while to settle on this) it was just a job of making it. We also had to make a poster to advertise our imaginary production. 

I tried to keep a lot of the design as a nod to Orton's interesting life, specifically his library book collages and wallpaper. I also tried to keep a sense of humour throughout the design as Joe Orton was wickedly funny. I imagined this incarnation of the play as an adult puppet show with almost life size puppets and have the people feel like part of the set so I decided to have bin bag bean bags (say that three times fast...) for the audience to sit in. For scale, the rats are supposed to be about a meter tall and controlled from a hidden platform above the set. The rats in the pictures are Kath and Sloane about to get it on.