The first production of Joe Orton’s Loot flopped terribly in 1966, and for a while this new version looks destined for the same. No longer funny, if it ever was, it remains surprisingly and unpleasantly callous. The story about a dead mother in her coffin and some stolen cash contains no real anger or satirical verve, just a puerile, aimless desire to shock. With its jokelets about Roman Catholicism and arch references to “family-planning equipment”, it’s more stale than a cheese and pickle sandwich from Lyons Corner House. The evening is saved, however, by a glorious central performance from David Haig. The other minor comedy deity here, Doon Mackichan (best known for Smack the Pony), looks rather uncomfortable as Fay, the scheming nurse, and all elbows and knees in a skimpy uniform. It’s Haig, as the sinister, bullying Truscott, who is the epicentre of comic energy, and once he comes to dominate the proceedings, the entertainment kicks off. Can he really be from the Metropolitan Water Board? Then why is he so interested in the missing loot? Here Orton displays his dramatic talent for the ingenious and unsettling, with Truscott’s evasions, silences and weird threats rendering the rest of the characters ever more colourless and helpless before him.

If some of the jokes have dated badly, others have increased in shock value, especially one about a brothel run by three Pakistanis, aged between 10 and 15: “They do it for sweets. Part of their religion.” Other directors might have carefully excised such a line, but not Sean Holmes.

And, post-Menezes, the larky portrait of police brutality has an uncomfortable resonance. “The police are for the protection of ordinary people!” the young Hal cries. “I don’t know where you pick up those slogans, sir,” says Truscott, chuckling and shaking his head. “The British police force used to be run by men of integrity,” says another. “That is a mistake that has been rectified,” he is assured. Haig is convincingly thuggish as well as comical, with his bristling moustache and bobbing bullet head.

This is an enjoyable production of a very minor comedy, but it suggests the path Orton might have taken had he lived. With its hints of Ionesco and Kafka, Loot is best on the sheer looniness and arbitrariness of the powerful, with their mad boasts to have saved the world when all they have really done is make things marginally worse.

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