January 1, 1933– Joe Orton:
“To be young, good-looking, healthy, famous, comparatively rich & happy is surely going against nature.”
If you have ever been the recipient of an email or letter of outrage from one, Edna Welthorpe, I suppose I must apologize, which is not the easiest thing for me to do. Edna, who lives in the ironically named Boring, Oregon, is the stolen alter-ego of playwright, Joe Orton, one of my favorite figures from the 20th century. In the 1950s, Orton created Edna Welthorpe & made her the guardian of public morals. Orton used the priggish Edna’s letters to goad those in authority into revealing their own innate idiocy.
Orton was not above writing letters criticizing his own plays in order to generate controversy & hence, publicity. I took up Edna’s personality in the summer of 2012, when I found myself jobless for the first time in 45 years & with time on my hands I began to write letters & emails to publishers, film studios, & theatre companies complaining of homosexual content. My Edna Welthorpe wrote a letter to Elle Décor magazine in September 2012 outraged that the publication featured “The residences of sodomites… can you just imagine the fluids on their walls?” My Edna also writes to guys on Craigslist, critical of the furnishings in the background of their dick shots in the Men Seeking Men personals. If you ever received one, please know that I did what needed to be done.
If you don’t know or understand Orton’s place in Theatre History, as a jumping off place, use the brilliant Stephen Frears’ film Prick Up Your Ears (1987), with an eerie portrayal of Orton from Gary Oldman, along with inspired work from Alfred Molina, Vanessa Redgrave, Wallace Shawn. It is based on the terrific biography of Orton with the same title by John Lahr, The New Yorker drama critic. The gay British playwright Orton is an incredibly important figure in queer literature. He is perhaps the finest writer of farce in the 20th century, a great stylist, in the tradition of Noël Coward, Harold Pinter & George Bernard Shaw.
He was born John Kingsley Orton to working-class parents in the East Midland of England. After joining several local theatrical companies, mostly playing insignificant roles, Orton took speech coaching to get rid of his lisp & his Northern English accent. He had been a student at a business college but he wanted to be an actor & auditioned for & was admitted to the Royal Academy Of Dramatic Arts in 1951.
Orton’s move to London was a pivotal moment in his life, the beginning of his real career as an actor & playwright, & his introduction to a fellow RADA student named Kenneth Halliwell, who became his mentor & his lover. Halliwell encouraged Orton to read & study the world’s great literature, & he had a strong influence on the development of Orton’s creative abilities.
Orton found work as an actor & stage manager for several years. He & Halliwell worked together on a novel, The Boy Hairdresser (1960) that failed to find a publisher. Finding no one to take their work seriously, the couple amused themselves with a series of hoaxes. Orton created his alter ego Edna Welthorpe, a snobby senior citizen. He later revived her to stir up controversy about his plays.
The couple also had a hobby of humorously defacing books borrowed from public libraries & then returning them in their altered state. They used plates from art books to decorate their tiny apartment, covering every inch in pictures, & they altered books by adding dirty photographs, surrealistic collages of musclemen & kittens, & outrageous pornographic rewritten copy to the book’s dust jacket flaps. Orton & Halliwell were eventually caught, arrested & charged, & sent to prison for 6 months in 1962. When the police raided their flat, they found thousands of loose plates & hundreds of stolen books.
After their release, Orton began to consider himself an author, & worked on his own novel Head To Toe (published posthumously in 1971), & writing his own plays. In 1964, the BBC produced Orton’s radio play The Ruffian On The Stair. It was then substantially rewritten & produced for the stage in 1966.
Orton loved the attention from the good reviews & began to pour out new plays. Entertaining Mr. Sloane found its way to theatre agent Peggy Ramsay who had it produced in 1964. Audiences were both shocked & amused. The reviews ranged from praise to outrage.
Entertaining Mr. Sloane lost money, but gay playwright Terence Rattigan, whose own works were strictly conventional, invested in it, & the play was transferred to a theatre in London’s West End winning rave reviews & several awards. Within a year, Entertaining Mr. Sloane had productions in NYC, Spain, Israel, & Australia, as well as being made into a film.
Orton’s greatest play was Loot (1964), a crazy parody of detective fiction, & one of darkest farces. It mocked the establishment’s notion of death, the police, justice, religion, & justice.
The Beatles were fans & engaged Orton to write a screenplay, Up Against It, for them to be directed Richard Lester.
As Orton a more famous, controversial figure in the world of London Theatre, Halliwell, an odd, withdrawn man, grew increasingly alienated & distraught, largely because of the continual rejection he faced as both a writer & a visual artist, & because of his poor self-image as an older, heavier, & bald companion to the boyish, hot Orton.
On August 9, 1967, Orton was bludgeoned to death in his sleep by Halliwell, who was found naked in the middle of their one room flat. His hands, chest & head were covered with Orton’s blood. He had swallowed 22 Nembutal pills, dying several hours before Orton, whose sheets were still warm when the police arrived.
The note on the desk in Halliwell’s writing read:
“If you read his diary all will be explained. K.H. PS: Especially the latter part.”
The last pages of the diary were missing.
Orton’s plays continue to be produced at theatre companies around the world. Halliwell’s single play remains unproduced. All 3 novels that he co-wrote with Orton remain unpublished.
In delicious irony, the defaced & altered books have recently been given gallery shows, one at the library that they were borrowed from.
I rather idolize Orton, except for that whole murder thing. His writing is anarchic, outrageous, & still shocking, which is inspiring to me. Today, I am reading The Joe Orton Diaries, collected & edited by Lahr.
“The kind of people who always go on about whether a thing is in good taste invariably have very bad taste.”
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