The Genius of Joe Orton

I’ve had a dozen occasions to mention one of my favorite modern playwrights Joe Orton (1933-1967) on this blog. In one post I talked about one of his projects, the screenplay he was developing for the Beatles at the time of his death. In this other one, I mentioned his notorious collage (since that post, I have indeed gone and adorned my walls with something similar, it graces my office even now.)

Orton was the modern Oscar Wilde; the intermediary was the novelist Ronald Firbank, whose rhetorical style Orton and his lover and one-time writing partner Kenneth Halliwell adopted. Like Wilde, Orton excelled at coining quotable epigrams that encapsulated the hypocrisies of the age. Like Wilde, he outraged conventional minds. And like Wilde, he did time in the slammer. Of course Wilde’s time in jail (or should I render it “gaol”?) was a life or death thing. It was precipitated by his very identity as a gay man, and when the sentence was over, Wilde scarcely outlived it. Whereas, Orton went to jail for the silliest of reasons. Pranks and vandalism. He doctored hundreds of library books by pasting other pictures over the author photos, and things like that. He actually did six months for that, but emerged from prison a better writer. Much like Jean Genet! And that is an advised comparison. Orton inherited that old mantle of the British commercial comic playwright, but he also infused his writing with something like existential outrage which classed him, or threatened to, with the Absurdists. Some of his writing sounds like Pinter, for example. Like Charles Ludlam, whom I also admire, Orton was also a classicist. He professed to hating books in interviews, but was also extraordinarily well read and it manifested in his writing. I think what he meant was that he hated bad books.

Orton was an auto-didact as far as reading went, but his theatrical education came from RADA. That is where the working class kid from Leicester met Halliwell, his senior by some sixteen years, and his keeper for most of that time while the two co-habitated in an idyllic sounding life of genteel poverty. Only in the last three or four years, when Orton became famous and well-paid, did the dynamic begin to shift.

Orton’s stageworks were so few at the time of his death that they are generally published in single volume editions. The best known are The Ruffian on the Stair (1964), Entertaining Mr. Sloane (1964), Loot (1965), and What the Butler Saw (first produced posthumously in 1969). His other plays include his take on The Bacchae called The Erpingham Camp (1966), followed by The Good and Faithful Servant (1967) and Funeral Games (1968).

Orton was working with Richard Lester on that screenplay for the Beatles Up Against It in his last weeks. He was coming up in the world and trying to figure out an exit strategy from his relationship with Halliwell. His growing detachment, and the details in his diary which described wonton promiscuity in places like public toilets, drove Halliwell to distraction until he smashed Orton’s skull in with a hammer. He then effected his own exit with an O.D. of sleeping pills. It was a horrible way for Orton to go. On the other hand, there is a kind of sordid, romantic glamor to it, not unlike the end of Kit Marlowe.

Orton and Halliwell died on August 9, 1967. Just over two weeks later, on August 27 Brian Epstein died from an O.D. as well. The playwright in me likes to make a connection. With the death of Orton, so died a movie project that might have continued the upward momentum of the Beatles’ careers. If Epstein was no longer booking live appearances for them, and now not even setting up movies for them, what was there to live for? I’m not saying that’s what happened, but it does make for a clean narrative line.

In 1978, John Lahrpublished Prick Up Your Ears: A Biography of Joe Orton, which was turned into a film in 1987, starring Gary Oldman, Alfred Molina, Wallace Shawn, and Vanessa Redgrave. Lahr also edited Orton’s diaries, which were published in 1996.

For more reading, checking out Jim Stafford’s terrific essay on the screen version of Loot here.