Coral's Copy - Edward Atienza

Posted by Coral Andrews Jun 5, 2006

Coral's Copy - a Playwrights 101 exclusive- will feature interviews with actors especially selected from my vast interview collection.

Edward Atienza has many tales to tell from his days at Royal Shakespeare Company with John Gielgud and Lawrence Olivier, to his time at Stratford Festival when he played the ill-fated Kemp in Joe Orton's Entertaining Mr Sloane.

Veteran actor Edward "Teddy" Atienza played Kemp in Entertaining Mr. Sloane for the 1991 Stratford Festival season. Actor Wayne Best called it "Teddy's Year of Abuse" from playing Willard in Robertson Davies World of Wonders to The Tempest's Trinculo to Kemp in Entertaining Mr. Sloane where he gets 'offed' in very violent way while getting his teeth knocked out.

Teddy Atienza - "Entertaining Mr. Sloane made Joe Orton's reputation in the '60s and I nearly brought a house opposite where they lived in that part of London (Noel Road - Islington) as a matter of fact, so I would have been there when the murder occurred."

"Orton wrote several plays - I have been in another of his plays - Loot. Orton is black humour that is hysterically funny but to do with death. Orton is as critical and satirical of society and people in society as Oscar Wilde, as the restoration playwrights, none of which you see are what they seem to be - rather sort of posh in pretty costumes. They are biting satires of the people and society of the time and that's why they are so exaggerated in their way."

"Entertaining Mr. Sloane is the same thing only Orton deals with the lower class, or lower-middle class and it is an absolutely brilliant play. It is extremely difficult to do in the sense that to hit the right note of the scale for the style and to get the style right is very,very difficult. There are only four people in it so that's kind of nice too and it's lovely, again it's like Waiting for Godot or something , like a string quartet- wonderful. But it is deceptive because it just looks like a lot of Brit talk you know .. 'allo 'allo ... and you think it's just that, but it's actually extremely difficult as you unravel the various implications."

"Kemp is the father of this woman [Kath] who lives in this house, who has a brother who comes in and she takes in this lodger, this boy, who they are both after one way or another. She gets pregnant by him.. and he beats me to death and that's basically the plot."

(He laughs)

"The brother has his own ideas. This old man Kemp, who is the girl's father and the boy's father, the son who doesn't live there but comes in, is the only one who actually tells the truth. The rest of it you don't know what is true because quite clearly, they are saying whatever they like in order to serve their own purposes. I know that this lodger is a murderer, and also I am a bit stupid and uneducated and full of horrible racial prejudices, and I won't compromise and can't do what they all do to get out of their problems so I get pfffftttpped ....

I am a man of principle by stubbornness, not by intelligence.

Whether people get it of course, is another story."