In a bitter irony, it also marked 50 years since the murder of Joe Orton, one of the boldest playwrights of the 20th century, whose work mocked and challenged the very hypocrisies and prejudices that the anti-gay legislation embodied.
In his most famous comedy, Loot, filial grief, terminal care and benevolent policing are all called into question as a son uses his mother’s coffin to stash the proceeds of a bank robbery, a nurse systematically murders her patients and a policeman inveigles his way into peoples’ homes and gives suspects “a kicking”.
Meanwhile the only innocent character, McLeavy, “a man who’s been kissed by the Pope”, is arrested and taken to a police cell where his murder is expected.
Loot contains many blissfully funny lines, as when Nurse Fay questions McLeavy: “You’ve been a widower for three days.
Have you considered a second marriage yet?” or her remark as she places the Ten Commandments on Mrs McLeavy’s coffin that: “She was a great believer in some of them.”
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These are matched by brilliant moments of black farce induced by the need to dispose of Mrs McLeavy’s displaced corpse.
The problem for any contemporary director is how to recreate the play’s initial impact in an age when religion – or, at any rate, Christianity – is regularly lampooned on stage and screen.
Nurse Fay’s tally of 87 murders in a geriatric ward is dwarfed by that of Harold Shipman; and, in 2015 alone, there were more than 3,000 complaints of police brutality.
Michael Fentiman’s solution in this pitch-perfect production is to have the corpse, which the Lord Chamberlain had originally dictated must be a dummy and appear “completely wrapped and shrouded”, played by an actress, the immensely game Anah Ruddin.
She consents to be manhandled, placed on her head in a cupboard, and stripped naked. The uneasy laughter provoked shows that the dead at least retain their power to shock.
The cast is uniformly excellent: Christopher Fulford gloriously mixes outrage and menace as the corrupt inspector; Sinead Matthews is enchantingly ruthless as Nurse Fay; Sam Frenchum and Calvin Demba are charmingly amoral as the two thieves; and Ian Redford is a hilariously deadpan McLeavy.
Tickets: 020 7870 6876/parktheatre.co.uk; £20-£29.50
Knives in Hens ***
Donmar, London
Illicit passion and murder take on a very different character in Knives In Hens, David Harrower’s intense but slight drama in which a ploughman’s wife and a miller kill the woman’s husband somewhere, sometime, in medieval England.
While convincingly rustic, Harrower’s spare dialogue creates problems since the wife’s motive for murder is unclear.
The only hint is her attraction to the miller when he offers her a pen and paper and shows her his library, both glaring anachronisms at a time when no peasant woman could write and books were for the clergy and nobility.
The play is given a richly atmospheric production by Yael Farber, its earthy passions vividly realised by Soutra Gilmour’s mud-caked set and the committed performances of Judith Roddy, Christian Cooke and Matt Ryan.
Tickets: 020 3282 3808/donmarwarehouse.com; £10-£40