Joe Orton

(1933–1967)

Loot by Joe Orton

West Yorkshire Playhouse, Quarry Theatre, 1996

THE RUFFIAN ON THE STAGE

When the New York production of Loot was being planned, Joe Orton predicted its failure and said, “Reputations are made in London; only money is made in New York.” Though keen to make both for himself, his main priority had always been for the quality of his work. His was the subversive voice of the swinging sixties, savaging the cosiness and self-delusion of English society through lacerating laughter.

Farce and Phantasmagoria

The foundations of his reputation were laid in December 1963 when Entertaining Mr Sloane was handed in to the office of his future agent, the redoubtable Peggy Ramsay. She immediately recognised that here was a genuinely interesting and original writer, and through her influence a professional production was planned for the following spring. The director of the chosen venue, the New Arts Theatre, was Michael Codron, the impresario who had been first to present the work of Harold Pinter, Henry Livings and David Rudkin. His response to Orton was no less enthusiastic: “When I read Sloane I felt it was unique stuff. Totally fresh…”

To a modern audience the anarchic and irreverent tone of Orton seems less shocking than it must have been to a contemporary public. Although the ‘well-made plays’ of Coward, Rattigan and Maugham had been effectively eclipsed by the more intellectually challenging works of Beckett, Osborne and Pinter, Orton’s style still came as a revelation. Whereas the others were using silence, menace and cosmic emptiness to express their vision, Orton was all full-throttle black farce, subverting the clichés of respectability into a phantasmagorical world where evil was rewarded and only the innocent suffered.

Over the next four years, he learnt his craft through experience and the trauma of misconceived productions of his works by directors who failed to grasp the tenor of his highly distinctive voice. The in August 1967 he was found murdered in the flat he shared with his lover and mentor Kenneth Halliwell. In a depressed and jealous rage, Halliwell had smashed his head in with a hammer and then committed suicide by swallowing twenty-two Nembutals.

This violent end was as sensational as anything Orton had invented for the stage. For some time afterward the scandal of their deaths, fuelled by the posthumous publication of Orton’s private diaries, obscured the true merits of a genius who was silenced in his prime. But in the thirty years since, directors and actors have gradually come to understand how to get the best out of Orton’s unique style and his last play, What the Butler Saw, is now considered by many to be one of the great English comedies of the 20th century, worthy of comparison with the best of Wilde and Shaw.

The Original Sloane

But there was nothing in Orton’s background to suggest he was to have such a major influence on contemporary theatre. His parents had married in their late twenties and lived in a council flat on the outskirts of Leicester. John (later Joe) was the eldest of four children. It was not a happy home: there was no money, no privacy, and no peace. It is thought that Kath and Kemp in Entertaining Mr Sloane owe a great deal to Orton’s parents, while he modelled the setting on memories of his childhood environment. When casting the character of Sloane for the TV production of the play, Orton even revealed the extent to which he saw Sloane as himself – his description of the actor was almost a self-portrait: “small and stocky… a combination of innocence and amorality… someone you’d like to fuck silly.”

Still his mother felt he was special and so he was sent to Clark’s College where he had a commercial rather than an academic education. The fees were beyond her means and she had to pawn her wedding ring at the end of one term. Orton hated the place and achieved nothing beyond the acquisition of basic typing and shorthand skills – though the latter came in useful when he wrote up his early sexual adventures in his diary at home. Otherwise, he was considered semi-literate, lacking in vocabulary and unable to express himself.

While his father was distant and ineffectual, his mother was erratic in her affections towards her children. When fame and money both finally came to Orton he did little to help them. He hated his mother’s provinciality and her prudishness, and made no provision for any of his family in his will.

At 16 he joined the Leicester Dramatic Society. Completely stagestruck, he was cast as a messenger with one line and a soldier in Richard III, but never got another part with them. So he joined two other groups and was eventually cast in the lead of Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird. This convinced him of his talent and, in between clerical jobs and other parts, he took lessons with a Madame Ada Rothery who was to recall later that “He was just another ordinary unsophisticated boy… No culture. No background. No education.” In the end a grant from the education authorities helped him take up a place at RADA. The break from Leicester was complete. Once Orton had moved to London, it became his home for the rest of his life.

Halliwell

It was at RADA that he met the neurotic, prematurely balding Kenneth Halliwell, who had inherited money from his father. Halliwell was older, better educated and in every way more sophisticated. Although they soon become lovers, their relationship was always based as much on intellectual empathy as it was on sex. Halliwell was father figure and friend, tutor and mentor, guide and guru. Orton was the willing apprentice whose abilities quickly outstripped those of the older man. But for a time each provided something the other needed.

Halliwell was an earnest though not abundantly talented actor. Orton on the other hand had vitality and imagination: “A promising student,” one report said. When Orton first moved in with Halliwell, he discovered his landlord-lover was writing a novel. With his training from Clark’s College he made himself useful typing up the manuscript. He started making suggestions which Halliwell incorporated, and while they collaborated on several unpublished works, Orton was soon writing himself.

The relationship, though on the surface a creative one, was just as surely to prove destructive to both. Their routine was claustrophobic – working all day together, rising with the dawn and going to bed at nightfall to save money on electricity. The furnishings of their tiny flat were austere, and the only luxury they could afford was the hedonistic and dangerous pursuit of sex at a time when homosexuality was outlawed. Even in this, Orton the pupil was far more popular with casual pick-ups than his master, and seemed indifferent to the effect his success was having on the dour Halliwell’s already weak self-image.

Prison

In 1962 they were arrested and convicted of stealing and mutilating library books. For several years they had been tampering with authors’ biographies on the flyleaves, defacing illustrations and bodily ripping out pictures from art books to decorate their rooms. Sent to different prisons, they were separated for the first time in years, and the experience further hardened Orton’s simmering hatred of authority. “Before prison,” he recalled, “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.” On his release he sublimated his resentment in work – gaol had brought detachment to his writing – and from 1963 until his death four years later he produced the complete body of plays by which he is now remembered.

Whether the relationship with Halliwell could have lasted as fame and age came on is doubtful. Their roles were now completely reversed and it was Halliwell who made the suggestions and corrections. As Orton’s star rose it became obvious that he was the talented one, and Halliwell’s increasingly despairing attempts to be recognised as the inspiration and guide (and, in many cases, coiner of the most memorable titles) were ignored.

Brothel

Wealth of course brought its own comforts and the pair undertook several trips to North Africa where the unlimited supply of beautiful young boys led one later commentator to remark “they treated the Third World as a brothel”. But while increasing success and fame imbued Orton’s work with ever greater comic verve and soaring confidence, the cracks in his domestic life were widening. In late May 1967, the couple were again holidaying in Tangier. “We sat talking of how happy we felt,” Orton wrote in his diary. “And how it couldn’t, surely, last. We’d have to pay for it. Or we’d be struck down from afar by disaster because we were, perhaps, too happy…” In the early hours of 9 August, he was struck down all right, but the blow came from somewhere much closer to home than he had anticipated.

Orton revelled in the outrageous. His private life may seem to be one amoral flight from maturity, but he was a perceptive critic of his own work and prepared to put in the hours that any dedicated artist must: “I do my best work rewriting.” He did not suffer fools gladly and had no time for cant or humbug. His ear for comic absurdity was sound. He was confident, brash and shamelessly iconoclastic. He enjoyed life and others enjoyed him.

His funeral took place on 18 August. Halliwell had been cremated the day before at Enfield, and one of his relatives had suggested that the lovers, killer and victim, be laid to rest together. Douglas Orton, the playwright’s younger brother, agreed: “As long as nobody hears about it in Leicester.” The ashes of both were duly mixed and scattered in the Garden of Remembrance at Golders Green.

PS

I’m still proud of that title, even though it was a bit of an in-joke. It’s a riff on the title of another Orton play, The Ruffian on the Stair, first broadcast on radio in 1964. And however ungenerous it may seem to say it, I’ve always regarded Orton a bit of a ruffian, if not an actual bit of rough lauded beyond his talents by a snobbish and pandering intelligentsia. Not that I ever met the bloke, of course, but if you read around a subject long enough you’re going to form some kind of opinion. By the time I came to write this piece I already had John Lahr’s admirable biography, Prick Up Your Ears, under my belt, and Gary Oldman had made an early impression with his note-perfect performance in the film adaptation, scripted by the equally incomparable Alan Bennett. Between the three of them I presume they managed to distil the essential qualities of the man.

I’ve always suspected Orton would have been a bit hard to take, a bit up himself, a bit too keen to remind you how much more talented he was than you. Which is fine, confidence has its place, though it is even harder to take than its opposite, excessive modesty, and harder still to take seriously when you yourself do not rate the boaster quite as highly as he rates himself. I suppose my main criticism comes down to the fact that, to me, all his characters sound the same; they think and respond and react in the same way, at the same level, from the same impulses. In short, they all sound like him, and real drama comes from conflict rather than consensus.

Having said that, I certainly seem to be in a minority when it comes to finding few good things to say about his style and content. But if I don’t make that clear in this article, that’s because this wasn’t the place. The point of the article was to introduce the author to the theatregoers who had seen (or were about to see) the play, and maybe suggest where some of the inspiration might have come from, and how the thing was received at the time. Because the times at that time were not the same as the times as they were at the time of writing.

And those times have changed again since. Typing up this piece now, nearly thirty years after it was first written, I’m intrigued to note that there was apparently no problem about including the F-word. It was by no means a common epithet in general publications in the mid-1990s, and certainly not as familiar on TV then as it is now. Larkin’s ‘This Be the Verse’ had been quoted in our programme for Hello and Goodbye by Athol Fugard around the same time (“They fuck you up, your mum and dad”), which surprised and secretly delighted me at the time.

Then again, it was hardly the kind of word that would shock any potential audience – if you turn up to see a Joe Orton play you probably have a pretty shrewd idea of what you’re going to be in for. Having said that, Orton himself was not allowed to use the word in any of his scripts as the censoring blue pencil of the Lord Chamberlain would have had them out before he could even have got the script into rehearsal. Change was in the wind, of course, but it would come too late for Orton. Then again, even I would grant that his ability to make his scurrilous mark without the need to litter the stage with obscenities suggests, if nothing else, that like all the great comedians of the previous decades, he had to make the most of the limitations imposed upon him and use them to his advantage. Unsubtle his message may have been, but his use of language needed to be of the highest calibre to get his point across, and like all the best comedy writers, he was first and foremost a master wordsmith.

(For further ruminations on the playwright and to read my own spoof all-purpose Joe Orton play, entitled What the Butler Looted, please see the Revues section of this website.)