Joe Orton

Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Joe Orton

(born Jan. 1, 1933, Leicester, Leicestershire, Eng. — died Aug. 9, 1967, London) British dramatist. Originally an unsuccessful actor, he turned to writing, finding success in 1964 when his radio play The Ruffian on the Stair was broadcast by the BBC. His three full-length plays, Entertaining Mr. Sloane (1964), Loot (1965), and What the Butler Saw (produced posthumously, 1969), were black comedies that scandalized audiences with their examination of moral corruption, violence, and sexual rapacity. Orton's career was cut short when he was murdered by K.L. Halliwell, his lifelong companion, who afterward committed suicide.

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Biography: John Kingsley Orton

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John Kingsley Orton (1933-1967) had a meteoric rise in British theater, with three hit plays produced in the 1960s.

John Kingsley (Joe) Orton was born in Leicester on January 1, 1933, the oldest of four children of a working-class family. His father was a low-paid gardener for the city; his mother worked in a hosiery factory until vision problems made it necessary for her to leave that job, after which she became a charwoman.

Although the family was not a close-knit one emotionally, the older son was his mother's favorite, and after Orton completed his required schooling she arranged to have him attend a commercial college, where he was a student from 1945 to 1947.

It was in 1949 that he developed the desire to act, or at least to be involved in the theater in some capacity. He joined the Leicester Dramatic Society and two other local drama groups, but was cast only infrequently and then usually in minor roles. The following year he took private elocution lessons, principally to purge himself of his Leicester accent, and applied to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), where he was accepted. In 1951 he moved to London.

In his first year at RADA Orton met Kenneth Halliwell, a fellow-student there. Halliwell was seven years older and was sophisticated and well-educated, especially in the Greek and Roman classics. They began a homosexual relationship which lasted for 16 years, and Halliwell's influence on the younger man was profound.

From an upper-middle-class family, Halliwell was no stranger to violent death. When he was 11 his mother was stung on the inside of her mouth by a wasp and, highly allergic to the toxin, choked to death. When he was 23 his father committed suicide, leaving him with a modest yearly income.

Orton acted successfully at RADA, but began to have misgivings about a career as an actor. Thus, when he finished his course there in 1953 he took a position for the spring and summer as the assistant stage manager of the Ipswich Repertory Company. He found this work not to his liking either and returned to London.

For most of the next decade he and Halliwell collaborated on a series of novels and literary experiments which were submitted to publishers but not accepted. They included The Silver Bucket (1953); The Mechanical Womb and The Last Days of Sodom (1955); The Boy Hairdresser, a satire in blank verse (1956); Between Us Girls, a diary novel (1957); and The Vision of Gombold Proval, written by Orton alone (1961).

While they were writing these books, they amused themselves in other ways. In 1958 Orton created the fictional Mrs. Edna Welthorpe, a writer of letters to the newspapers whom he used as an outraged critic of his work after he achieved fame; she was joined later by the imaginary Donald H. Hartley, an Orton booster. In the period from 1959 to 1961 he and Halliwell took books from the Islington public libraries, rewrote the blurbs on the inside of the dust jackets to make them either absurd or obscene, and simultaneously stole 1,653 plates from art books from which they constructed a floor-to-ceiling collage in their apartment. Both were arrested, charged with doing 450 English pounds in damage, convicted, and sent to prison for six months. Orton was unrepentant.

Orton achieved his first breakthrough in 1963. His play The Ruffian on the Stair, based on the novel The Boy Hairdresser, was accepted for television by the BBC, and his first full-length play, Entertaining Mr. Sloane, was sent to an agent; both were presented the following year.

The Ruffian on the Stair shows the strong influence of Harold Pinter, one of the few modern dramatists whom Orton admired (along with Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw), and its opening lines, a conversation between the protagonist and his wife, set the tone for all of Orton's work to come:

Joyce: Have you got an appointment today?
Mike: Yes. I'm to be at King's Cross station at eleven. I'm meeting a man in the toilet.
Joyce: You always go to such interesting places.

As John Lahr summarized it in his introduction to the complete plays, "Orton's plays put sexuality back on the stage in all its exuberant, amoral and ruthless excess. He laughed away sexual categories."

This unique perspective was reinforced by Entertaining Mr. Sloane, which opened in London on May 6, 1964. It is the story of a handsome young man who has committed a murder and is taken into the home of Kath, the epitome of bourgeois hypocrisy, and her aged father, Kemp. Sex between Sloane and Kath begins at once. Soon there appears on the scene Kath's brother Ed, who also has designs on the young man. Kemp recognizes Sloane as the murderer and Sloane kills him. Kath and Ed agree to cover up the murder of their father if Sloane consents to spend six months of every year with each of them.

Sloane demonstrates the validity of Maurice Charney's assessment, "All of his most vigorous characters are vulgar in the literary sense of the term: they pretend to a refinement, tact and gentility that they do not at all have." His characters and his play appealed to the British theater-going public. Writing in the Sunday Telegraph, Alan Brien observed, "Mr. Orton is one of those rare dramatists who create their own world and their own idiom," while prominent playwright Terence Rattigan wrote, "I fell wildly in love with Entertaining Mr. Sloan. … I saw style - a style, well, that could be compared with the Restoration comedies. I saw Congreve in it." At season's end, Sloane tied for the best new British play in Variety's London Critics' Poll, but, taken to New York, it fared badly and closed after a short run, the World Telegram and Sun critic commenting that it "had the sprightly charm of a medieval cesspool."

In the early months of 1964 Orton wrote The Good and Faithful Servant, which was televised three years later. His most serious work, it owes something to the lives of his parents as it covers the last working days, the retirement, and the death of a loyal employee of a large corporation. Although it contains some humorous lines, it is essentially a picture of a life pathetically spent.

Later that year he completed his second major work, the full-length play Loot. The principal characters are Hal McLeavy and his lover Dennis, who have robbed a bank and are planning to escape to the Continent. Their project is complicated by the death of Hal's mother, whose body is in the house. Also present are the mother's former nurse, Fay, who wants to marry the widower McLeavy, making him her eighth husband in the past ten years, and the stupid, vicious, and venal policeman Truscott. In the end the two boys, Fay, and Truscott split the loot and the innocent elder McLeavy is arrested and taken off to prison.

Loot premiered on September 27, 1966, and was a hit. Ronald Bryden in The Observer wrote that it "establishes Orton's niche in English drama," and at season's end it won both the Evening Standard award and the Plays and Players award for the best play of the year.

In 1965 Orton wrote another television play, The Erpingham Camp, strongly influenced by The Bacchae of Euripides; it was produced the following year. Another television drama, Funeral Games, was written in 1966 and produced two years later.

Late in 1966 Orton began his third full-length play, What the Butler Saw, the first draft of which was completed in July of 1967; simultaneously he worked on a comedy, Up Against It, based on The Silver Bucket, for the Beatles, although eventually their managers rejected it.

But as Orton's celebrity increased, relations between him and Halliwell became more and more strained. As the playwright's exuberance grew, the older man was increasingly depressed and withdrawn and there were indications that Orton planned to leave him. On August 9, 1967, Halliwell bludgeoned Orton to death with a hammer and then committed suicide.

Chief among Orton's works posthumously presented was What the Butler Saw, produced in 1969. A farce with a small debt to the French dramatist Georges Feydeau, it takes place in the office of the psychiatrist Dr. Prentice, whose wife is a nymphomaniac, and introduces a girl who is applying for a position as the doctor's secretary and a young hotel page who has arrived to blackmail Mrs. Prentice. The young people are eventually discovered to be the Prentices' children; the question of double incest is raised and the play ends with the holding on high of the genitals of Winston Churchill, taken from a statue which has been blown up.

The play drew highly disparate reviews. Harold Hobson wrote, "Gradually Orton's terrible obsession with perversion, which is regarded as having brought his life to an end and choked his very high talent, poisons the atmosphere. And what should have become a piece of gaily irresponsible nonsense becomes impregnated with evil." On the other hand, Frank Marcus in the Sunday Telegraph observed that it "will live to be accepted as a comedy classic of English literature."

Other posthumous works included the sketch "Until She Screams," revised from The Patient Dowager (1970); Head to Toe, based on The Vision of Gombold Proval (1971), and Up Against It (1979).

The importance of Orton's work seems established. C.W.E. Bigsby calls him "a pivotal figure, a crucial embodiment of the post-modernist impulse," while Charney (quoted earlier) concludes, "Orton no longer seems to be merely a footnote in the history of modern drama but merits at least a significant chapter."

Early life

Orton was born at Causeway Lane Maternity Hospital, Leicester, to a working class family. Until the age of two, he lived at 261 Avenue Road Extension in Clarendon Park, Leicester. The family then moved to the Saffron Lane council estate. He lived with his younger brother, Douglas, and two younger sisters, Marilyn and Leonie. His parents, William and Elsie, had married in 1931; his father worked for Leicester Council as a gardener, while his mother worked in the local footwear industry until tuberculosis cost her a lung.

Orton attended Marriots Road Primary School, but failed the eleven-plus exam after extended bouts of asthma, and so took a secretarial course at Clark's College in Leicester from 1945 to 1947. ^[1] He then began working as a junior clerk on £3 a week.

Orton became interested in performing in the theatre around 1949 and joined a number of different dramatic societies, including the prestigious Leicester Dramatic Society. While working on amateur productions he was also determined to improve his appearance and physique, buying body-building courses, taking elocution lessons, and trying to redress his lack of education and culture. He applied for a scholarship at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in November 1950. He was accepted, and left the East Midlands for London. His entrance into RADA was delayed until May 1951 by appendicitis.

Orton met Kenneth Halliwell at RADA in 1951, moving into a West Hampstead flat with him and two other students in June of that year. Halliwell was seven years older than Orton and of independent means, having a substantial inheritance. They quickly formed a strong relationship and became lovers.

After graduating, both Orton and Halliwell went into a regional repertory work; Orton spent four months in Ipswich as an assistant stage manager, Halliwell in Llandudno, Wales. Both returned to London and became writers. They collaborated on a number of unpublished novels (often imitating Ronald Firbank), and had little success. The rejection of their great hope, The Last Days of Sodom, in 1957 led them to solo works. Orton would later return to the books for ideas and many show glimpses of his stage play style.

They refused to work for long periods, confident of their "specialness"; they subsisted on Halliwell's money (as well as the dole) and were forced to follow an ascetic life in order to restrict their outgoings to £5 a week. From 1957-59, they worked in six-month stretches at Cadbury's to raise money for a new flat; they moved into a small, austere flat on Noel Road in Islington in 1959.

A lack of serious work led them to amuse themselves with pranks and hoaxes. Orton created the alter ego Edna Welthorpe, an elderly theatre snob, whom he would later revive to stir controversy over his plays. Orton coined the term as an allusion to Terence Rattigan's "Aunt Edna", Rattigan's archetypal playgoer.

In another episode, Orton and Halliwell stole books from the local library, and would subtly modify the cover art or the blurbs before returning them to the library. A volume of poems by John Betjeman, for example, was returned to the library with a new dustjacket featuring a photograph of a nearly naked, heavily tattooed middle-aged man. The couple took many of the prints to decorate their flat.

They were eventually discovered, and prosecuted for this in May 1962. The incident was reported in Daily Mirror as "Gorilla in the Roses". They were charged with five counts of theft and malicious damage, admitted damaging more than 70 books, and were jailed for six months (released September 1962) and fined £262. The sentence was unduly harsh, Orton and Halliwell felt, "because we were queers."^[2] For Orton however, prison would be a crucial formative experience, the isolation from Halliwell allowing him to break free of him creatively, and laying bare for him the corruptness, priggishness and double-standards of a purportedly liberal country. As Orton put it, ‘It affected my attitude towards society. Before I had been vaguely conscious of something rotten somewhere, prison crystallised this. The old whore society really lifted up her skirts and the stench was pretty foul... Being in the nick brought detachment to my writing. I wasn’t involved anymore. And suddenly it worked.’ ’^[3]

The books that Orton and Halliwell vandalised have since become the most valued of the Islington Library service collection.^{[citation needed]}^{[dubious – discuss]}

The collection of books can be viewed here: http://www.joeorton.org/Pages/Joe_Orton_Gallery13.html

Career

In the early 1960s Orton began to write plays. He wrote his last novel, Head to Toe, in 1961, and soon afterward had his writing accepted. In 1963 the BBC paid £65 for the radio play The Ruffian on the Stair, broadcast on 31 August 1964. It was substantially rewritten for the stage in 1966.

Orton revelled in his achievement and poured out new works. He had completed Entertaining Mr. Sloane by the time The Ruffian on the Stair was broadcast. He sent a copy to theatre agent Peggy Ramsay in December 1963. It premiered at the New Arts Theatre on 6 May 1964 under the direction of Michael Codron. Reviews ranged from praise to outrage.

Entertaining Mr Sloane lost money in its three week run, but critical praise from playwright Terence Rattigan (who invested £3,000 in it) ensured its survival. The play was transferred to Wyndham's Theatre in the West End at the end of June and to the Queen's Theatre in October. Sloane tied for first in the Variety Critics' Poll for "Best New Play" and Orton came second for "Most Promising Playwright." Within a year, Sloane was being performed in New York, Spain, Israel and Australia, as well as being made into a film and a television play.

Orton's next performed work was Loot. The first draft was written between June and October 1964 and entitled Funeral Games, a title Orton would drop at Halliwell's suggestion but would later reuse. The play is a wild parody of detective fiction, adding the blackest farce and jabs at established ideas on death, the police, religion and justice. Orton offered the play to Codron in October 1964 and it underwent sweeping rewrites before it was judged fit for the West End (for example, the character of "Inspector Truscott" had a mere eight lines in the initial first act.)

Codron had manoeuvred Orton into meeting his colleague Kenneth Williams in August 1964. Orton reworked Loot with Williams in mind for Truscott. His other inspiration for the role was DS Harold Challenor.

With the success of Sloane, Loot was hurried into pre-production, despite its obvious flaws. Rehearsals began in January 1965 with a six-week tour culminating in a West End debut planned. The play opened in Cambridge on 1 February to scathing reviews.

Orton, at odds with director Peter Wood over the plot, produced 133 pages of new material to replace, or add, to the original 90. The play received poor reviews in Brighton, Oxford, Bournemouth, Manchester, and finally Wimbledon in mid-March. Discouraged, Orton and Halliwell went on an 80-day holiday in Tangier, Morocco.

In January 1966, Loot was revived, with Oscar Lewenstein taking up an option. Before his production, it had a short run (April 11-23) at the University Theatre, Manchester. Orton's growing experience led him to cut over 600 lines, raising the tempo and improving the characters' interactions.

Directed by Braham Murray, the play garnered more favourable reviews. Lewenstein was still a little cool, however, and put the London production in a "sort of Off-West End theatre", the Jeanetta Cochrane Theatre in Bloomsbury, under the direction of Charles Marowitz.

Orton continued his habit of clashing with directors with Marowitz, but the additional cuts they agreed to further improved the play. It premiered in London on 27 September 1966, to rave reviews. Loot moved to the Criterion Theatre in November, raising Orton's confidence to new heights while he was in the middle of writing What the Butler Saw.

Loot went on to win several awards and firmly established Orton's fame. He sold the film rights for £25,000, although he was certain it would flop; it did, and Loot on Broadway repeated the failure of Sloane. Orton was still on an absolute high, however, and over the next ten months revised The Ruffian on the Stair and The Erpingham Camp for the stage as a double called Crimes of Passion, wrote Funeral Games, the screenplay Up Against It for the Beatles, and worked on What the Butler Saw.

The Good and Faithful Servant was a transitional work for Orton. A one-act television play, it was completed by June 1964 but first broadcast by Associated-Rediffusion on 6 April 1967.

The Erpingham Camp, Orton's take on The Bacchae, written through mid-1965 and offered to Rediffusion in October of that year, was broadcast on June 27, 1966 as the 'pride' segment in their series Seven Deadly Sins.

Orton wrote and rewrote Funeral Games four times from July - November, 1966. Created for a 1967 Rediffusion series, The Seven Deadly Virtues, Orton's play dealt with charity — especially Christian charity — in a confusion of adultery and murder. However Rediffusion did not use the play. Instead it was made as one of the first productions of the new ITV company Yorkshire Television, and was broadcast posthumously on August 26, 1968.

In March 1967 Orton and Halliwell had intended another extended holiday in Libya, but unhappy at the lack of hotel accommodation and the fact the only place they could find to stay was on a boat which had been converted into a hotel/nightclub they returned home the day after they arrived. Orton was working hard, energised and happy; Halliwell was increasingly depressed, argumentative, and plagued with mystery ailments.

Orton's controversial farce What The Butler Saw debuted in the West End after his death in 1969. It opened at the Queen's Theatre with Sir Ralph Richardson, Coral Browne, Stanley Baxter, and Hayward Morse.

Murder

On August 9, 1967, Halliwell bludgeoned the 34-year-old Orton to death with nine hammer blows to the head, and then committed suicide with an overdose of 22 Nembutal tablets washed down with the juice from canned grapefruit. Investigators determined that Halliwell died first, because Orton's body was still warm.

The November 22, 1970 edition of The Sunday Times reported that on August 5, 1967, four days before the murder, Orton went to the Chelsea Potter pub in the King's Road. He met friend Peter Nolan who later gave evidence at the inquest that Orton told him that he had another boyfriend, and that he wanted to end his relationship with Halliwell but didn't know how to go about it.

The last person to speak to Halliwell was his doctor, who arranged for a psychiatrist to see him the following morning. He spoke to Halliwell three times on the telephone. The last call was at 10 o'clock. Halliwell took the psychiatrist's address and said, "Don't worry, I'm feeling better now. I'll go and see the doctor tomorrow morning."

Halliwell had felt increasingly threatened and isolated by Orton's success, and had come to rely on anti-depressants and barbiturates. The bodies were discovered the following morning when a chauffeur arrived to take Orton to a meeting to discuss a screenplay he had written for the Beatles.

Halliwell left a suicide note, informing police that all would be explained if they read Orton's diaries, "especially the latter part". The diaries have since been published.

Orton was cremated at the Golders Green Crematorium, his maroon cloth draped coffin being brought into the west chapel to a recording of The Beatles song A Day in the Life. ^[4] The eulogy was read by Harold Pinter, who concluded by saying "he was a bloody marvellous writer." According to Dennis Dewsnap's memoire (What's Sex Got To Do With It, The Syden Press, 2004) from mostly Tangiers, where Orton and Halliwell went on holiday, Orton and his lover/murderer had their ashes mixed and were buried together. Dewsnap writes about Orton's agent Peggy Ramsay: "...At the scattering of Joe's and Kenneth's ashes, his sister took a handful from both urns and said 'a little bit of Joe, and a little bit of Kenneth. I think perhaps a little bit more of our Joe, and then some more of Kenneth'. At which Peggy snapped 'Come on, dearie, it's only a gesture, not a recipe.', a line surely worthy of Joe himself - though indicative of the contempt in which Ramsey held the Orton family. She described them as simply "the little people in Leicester"^[5], leaving a cold nondescript note and bouquet on their behalf at the funeral. Orton's legacy stands to live on in his home town, Leicester as the development of the "cultural quarter" of the city (a former industrial area) continues apace and the new Theatre, Curve, the central development in the area, has a new pedestrian concourse outside the theatre's main entrance named, "Orton Square". Curve officially opens on December 4 2008.

Biography and film, radio, TV

John Lahr wrote a biography of Orton entitled Prick Up Your Ears, a title Orton himself had considered using, in 1978. The 1987 film adaptation is based on Orton's diaries and on Lahr's research. Directed by Stephen Frears, it starred Gary Oldman as Orton, Alfred Molina as Halliwell and Vanessa Redgrave as Peggy Ramsay. Alan Bennett wrote the screenplay.

Joe Orton was played by the actor Kenny Doughty in the BBC film Kenneth Williams: Fantabulosa!, starring Michael Sheen as Kenneth Williams.

Two archive recordings of Orton survive: a short BBC radio interview first transmitted in August 1967 and a video recording, held by the BFI, of his appearance on Eamonn Andrews' ITV chat show transmitted 23 April 1967.

Plays

Fred and Madge (written 1959, published 2001)
The Visitors (written 1961, published 2001)
The Ruffian on the Stair (first performance 1964)
Entertaining Mr Sloane (first performance 1964)
Loot (first performance 1965)
The Erpingham Camp (first performance 1966)
The Good and Faithful Servant (first performance 1967)
Funeral Games (first performance 1968)
What the Butler Saw (first performance 1969)
Up Against It (screenplay)

Novels

Head to Toe (published 1971)
Between Us Girls (published 2001)
Lord Cucumber and The Boy Hairdresser (co-written with Halliwell) (published 2001)

References

^ Stage and Screen Lives, p.249, Oxford University Press, 2001.
^ http://www.joeorton.org/Pages/Joe_Orton_Life12.html
^ http://www.joeorton.org/Pages/Joe_Orton_Life13.html
^ A Times correspondent 19 08 1967 - timesonline archive assessed 27 08 2009
^ "A ceremony" by Leonie Barnett, Entertaining Mr. Sloane' Programme, Ambassadors' Theatre Group, 2009.'

Sources

Banham, Martin, ed. 1998. The Cambridge Guide to Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. ISBN 0521434378.
Bigsby, C. W. E. 1982. Joe Orton. Contemporary Writers ser. London: Routledge. ISBN 0416316905.
Burke, Arthur. 2001. Laughter in the Dark - The Plays of Joe Orton. Billericay, Essex: Greenwich Exchange. ISBN 1871551560.
Charney, Maurice. 1984. Joe Orton. Grove Press Modern Dramatists ser. NY: Grove P. ISBN 039454241X.
Coppa, Francesca, ed. 2002. Joe Orton: A Casebook. Casebooks on Modern Dramatists ser. London: Routledge. ISBN 0815336276.
DiGaetani, John Louis. 2008. Stages of Struggle: Modern Playwrights and Their Psychological Inspirations. Jefferson: McFarland. ISBN 0786431571.
Fox, James. 1970. "The Life and Death of Joe Orton." The Sunday Times Magazine issue of 22 November.
Lahr, John. 1978. Prick Up Your Ears: The Biography of Joe Orton. London: Bloomsbury. ISBN 0747560145.
---, ed. 1986. The Orton Diaries. By Joe Orton. London: Methuen. ISBN 0306807335.
---. 1989. Diary of a Somebody. London: Methuen. ISBN 0413611809.
Orton, Joe. 1976. The Complete Plays. London: Methuen. ISBN 0413346102.
Ruskino, Susan. 1995. Joe Orton. Twayne's English Authors ser. Boston: Twayne. ISBN 0805770348.

External links

Joe Orton Online: A website dedicated to the writer.

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