Joe Orton – A Brief Life If Halliwell had not murdered him, and God willing in the meanwhile, Orton would have celebrated his sixty-ninth birthday on New Year’s Day this year. It is sad to think what we have missed from a possible thirty-five years of productivity from the writer who, with What the Butler Saw, had made a striking advance in the practice of theatrical art, an apotheosis of farce. What would Joe Orton have been like, what would he have written in later middle age? Orton was born John Kingsley Orton in Leicester in 1933. His early life was filled by plans for escape through a career in the theatre. He died at the age of 34 in 1967, battered to death by his sometime collaborator, lover and flatmate, Kenneth Halliwell, who then took an overdose of twenty-two Nembutals. In the space of his short life Orton, a puckish chameleon, had changed his name and his age (he claimed to be five years younger than he was) and had written three first-class comedies for the British stage; Entertaining Mr Sloane won the London Critics’ Variety Award as the best play of 1964, and Loot won the Evening Standard Drama Award for the best play of 1966. So great was the impact of Orton’s enforced naturalism – double entendres masquerading as information – that a new adjective, ‘Ortonesque’, was coined to describe his essential style and concerns. Alongside his plays, Orton’s diaries are a major literary achievement, providing us with hilarious insights into the creative whirl of London in the 60s. Nobody writing about Orton today can fail to acknowledge the work of John Lahr in editing the diaries and producing a biography, Prick Up Your Ears, both frank and perceptive. From 1951 to 1953 Orton studied at RADA. It was there he met Halliwell, who frightened classmates by convincingly miming strangling an imaginary cat. Orton should have taken heed. Instead he was happily engaged in swapping partners during dancing exams and finding himself ‘accidentally’ in the arms of a man. Together Orton and Halliwell embarked on a series of co-written extravaganzas in the form of literary pastiches of the masters of all they considered camp and witty in the English literary tradition, tracing a line through Marlowe, Congreve, Jane Austen (Orton loved her juvenilia), Oscar Wilde and Ronald Firbank. Foremost among Orton and Halliwell’s literary fathers, Firbank was a stylist who introduced the cast of usual suspects to “queer” literature: choirboys, nuns, priests, Cardinals, the Pope, the Queen (Victoria) and queens. These characters formed the basis of the camp froth of Orton and Halliwell’s fictive worlds. For most of the 50s both men were on the dole; at one point Orton was Assistant Stage Manager at Ipswich Rep Theatre, at another he worked in a chocolate factory. They suffered a change in their fortunes when their “creative re-arranging” of books from Islington Library led to a six month prison sentence in 1962. Orton was convinced that the two of them had been targeted for prosecution because of their homosexuality. They had removed over a thousand pictures from art books and used them to decorate the walls of their bed-sit in 25 Noel Street. They had also typed false blurbs into book jackets and superimposed montages of strange and suggestive images onto jacket covers. Dorothy Sayers and John Betjeman were among their victims. From the prison, a sharper Orton emerged. Soon he was independently producing scripts good enough to catch the attention of the BBC and the Royal Court. In 1964 he changed his name, shaved five years off his age, declared he was gay, straight, engaged or divorced (depending on his conversational companion’s attitudes), Entertaining Mr Sloane was performed and The Ruffian on the Stair was presented on the BBC Third Programme. Loot went through several phases of writing and an abortive first run before becoming a hit in September 1966. No doubt its success was partly due to Orton’s writing to the newspapers under the guise of several disapproving characters, who stood for (and simultaneously guyed) all that was most clichéd and moribund in middle England. ‘Edna Welthorpe (Mrs)’ had become a regular correspondent to the Daily Telegraph. Here she is on Entertaining Mr Sloane: "I myself was nauseated by this endless parade of mental and physical perversion. And to be told that such a disgusting piece of filth now passes for humour. Today’s young playwrights take it upon themselves to flaunt their contempt for ordinary decent people. I hope that the ordinary decent people will strike back!" With Loot, Orton won the Evening Standard Award for Best Play of 1966. Edna Welthorpe was delighted. So too was Peggy Ramsay, Orton’s agent. Presumably Mrs Orton, Joe’s mother, would have been pleased to know that her false teeth had been appropriated from the family home by her son at her funeral and presented to the cast of Loot to use as a prop. Halliwell, meanwhile, continued in the downward spiral of depression that would lead to both men’s deaths. What the Butler Saw was completed but not performed by the time of Orton’s death. Its first successful performance was not till 1975. Orton’s last piece of writing, a screenplay for the Beatles called Up Against It, was rejected by the Fab Four’s manager, Brian Epstein, who believed that the boys’ image would not be well served by an end scene where the heroine jumps into bed with the whole band at once. Orton’s next play, with its punning title supplied by Halliwell, Prick Up Your Ears, was to have been a farce based on improbable goings on before the coronation of Edward VII. Having supplied the title, Halliwell also supplied the hammer-blows that ended Orton’s career. What words are sufficient to define ‘Ortonesque’: savage, unforgiving, sly, witty, sexually and socially avant-garde or non-conformist, silly, epigrammatical, fantastic? What remains of that unconventional life and style? The public lavatory on the Holloway Road that features in one memorable episode in the diaries (Saturday 4th March 1967) has now been preserved for the nation with money from the National Lottery. A blue plaque marks the spot. From the portrait drawn by Patrick Procktor in 1967, Orton, master of the comedy of deliberate misunderstanding, stares out naked, except for a pair of white socks. The confidence of the man who was now Joe Orton, 29, who had been John Kingsley Orton, 34, is apparent. And there he remains, as much a dead golden boy of literature as Keats or Shelley or Chatterton, safely iconic. But not so safely. Anarchy and destruction remain the theatrical aces up Orton’s sleeve; his legacy, the straight smile waiting for the next disaster to happen. James Methven

Orton at the opening of Loot -- Kenneth Halliwell -- Leonard Rossiter as Inspector Truscott in Loot -- Orton just before his death