Prick Up Your Ears: The Biography of Joe Orton Click cover to BUY |
"I'm an acquired taste," admitted playwright Joe Orton in 1967. "That's a double entendre if ever there was one." Orton liked to shock. And speak the unspeakable. It was this anarchic quality that gave his plays their dark mischievous edge.
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"The Oscar Wilde of the Welfare State gentility" - as the Guardian once described him - was born on January 1 1933. Orton grew up in a working class ghetto of Leicester, an area he later referred to as "the gutter". A place his critics argued he never left.
Often absent from his studies, Orton left school barely literate. Moving from one dreary job to the next, Orton dreamt of working in the theatre and was eventually awarded a RADA scholarship. It was there that Orton met Kenneth Halliwell. Seven years older than Orton, Halliwell became the young man's mentor and long-term lover. Encouraged by Halliwell, Orton began to write. By 1964, Orton had written the hugely successful Entertaining Mr Sloane. Its homosexual subtext caused much upset. A review in the Telegraph read: "Not for a long time have I disliked a play so much." But whether the Establishment liked it or not, Orton had found his voice and had arrived. Following the success of Sloane, Orton went on to write What The Butler Saw and Loot. In the meantime, Halliwell (a wannabe writer himself) remained unpublished and became resentful of his student's success. In May 1967, whilst in Tangiers, Orton had written how the couple would more than likely be "struck down from afar by disaster" because they were, perhaps, too happy. "To be young, good-looking, healthy, famous and comparatively rich and happy is surely going against nature. And when to the list one adds that daily I have the company of beautiful fifteen year old boys who find (for a small fee) fucking with me a delightful sensation, no man can want for more." Three months later, Halliwell smashed Orton's brains in with a hammer, and then killed himself with an overdose of sleeping tablets. In 1993, a public toilet regularly used by Orton for sex was awarded a preservation order by the English Heritage Society. No doubt Orton would have approved of such an unconventional and controversial memorial. |
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