( This volume contains every play written by Joe Orton, w...)
This volume contains every play written by Joe Orton, who emerged in the 1960s as the most talented comic playwright in recent English history. Orton, who was murdered in 1967 at the age of thirty-four, was considered the direct successor to Wilde, Shaw, and Coward. Includes: The Ruffian on the Stair Entertaining Mr. Sloane The Good and Faithful Servant Loot The Erpingham Camp Funeral Games What the Butler Saw
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( To be young, good-looking, healthy, famous, comparativ...)
To be young, good-looking, healthy, famous, comparatively rich and happy is surely going against nature. When Joe Orton (1933?1967) wrote those words in his diary in May 1967, he was being hailed as the greatest comic playwright since Oscar Wilde for his darkly hilarious Entertaining Mr. Sloane and the farce hit Loot, and was completing What the Butler Saw; but less than three months later, his longtime companion, Kenneth Halliwell, smashed in Orton's skull with a hammer before killing himself. The Orton Diaries, written during his last eight months, chronicle in a remarkably candid style his outrageously unfettered life: his literary success, capped by an Evening Standard Award and overtures from the Beatles; his sexual escapades?at his mother's funeral, with a dwarf in Brighton, and, extensively, in Tangiers; and the breakdown of his sixteen-year "marriage" to Halliwell, the relationship that transformed and destroyed him. Edited with a superb introduction by John Lahr, The Orton Diaries is his crowning achievement.
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( A black farce masterpiece, Loot follows the fortunes of...)
A black farce masterpiece, Loot follows the fortunes of two young thieves, Hal and Dennis. Dennis is a hearse driver for an undertaker. They have robbed the bank next door to the funeral parlour and have returned to Hal's home to hide-out with the loot. Hal's mother has just died and the pair put the money in her coffin, hiding the body elsewhere in the house. With the arrival of Inspector Truscott, the thickened plot turns topsy-turvy. Playing with all the conventions of popular farce, Orton creates a world gone mad and examines in detail English attitudes at mid-century. The play has been called a Freudian nightmare, which sports with superstitions about death - and life. It is regularly produced in professional and amateur productions. First produced in London in 1966, Loot was hailed as "the most genuinely quick-witted, pungent and sprightly entertainment by a new, young British playwright for a decade" (Sunday Telegraph). The Student Edition offers a plot summary, full commentary, character notes and questions for study, besides a chronology and bibliography.
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(Two novels which mark the beginning and the end of the fa...)
Two novels which mark the beginning and the end of the famous writing partnership of Orton and Halliwell. Lord Cucumber is a camp pastiche of a Mills and Boon romance, set on a cruise ship in the isles of Greece. The Boy Hairdresser depicts the tortured relationship of two Angry Young Men.
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John Kingsley (Joe) Orton was born in Leicester, England, United Kingdom, 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/
After Orton completed his required schooling his mother arranged to have him attend a commercial college, where he was a student from 1945 to 1947.
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.
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.
In 1951 he moved to London. 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 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.
His unique perspective was reinforced by Entertaining Mr. Sloane, which opened in London on May 6, 1964. 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.
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. 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.
Chief among Orton's works posthumously presented was What the Butler Saw, produced in 1969. 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).
He had a meteoric rise in British theater, with three hit plays: The Ruffian on the Stair, Entertaining Mr. Sloane, The Good and Faithful Servant, produced in the 1960s. He amused audiences with his scandalous black comedies. The adjective Ortonesque is sometimes used to refer to work characterised by a similarly dark yet farcical cynicism.
( This volume contains every play written by Joe Orton, w...)
( To be young, good-looking, healthy, famous, comparativ...)
(Two novels which mark the beginning and the end of the fa...)
( A black farce masterpiece, Loot follows the fortunes of...)
Quotes from others about the person
As John Lahr summarized: "Orton's plays put sexuality back on the stage in all its exuberant, amoral and ruthless excess. He laughed away sexual categories. "
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 the work of Orton - Entertaining Mr. Sloan. .. . I saw style - a style, well, that could be compared with the Restoration comedies. I saw Congreve in it. "
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. "
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. "
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.
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.
