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Coming Out in The Room: Joe Orton's Epigrammatic ReNision of Harold Pinter's Menace FRANCESCA COPPA In a production note to the Royal Court Theater explaining his first play, The Ruffian on the Stair, Joe Orton wrote: Everything the characters say is true. MIKE has murdered the boy's brother. JOYCE is an ex~call girl. wn..sON has an incestuous relationship with his brother. wn.sON does provoke MIKE into murdering him .... Everything is as clear as the most reactionary Telegraph reader could wish.' What interests me is Orton's evocation of the Telegraph reader: the events of Ruffian are not "realistic" but journalistic. The "truth" he is insisting upon is not to be found in reality, but in the newspapers; not in anything resembling "life", but in a certain kind of text. And, in fact, this is the crucial fact of Orton's work - its evocation of lexts and textuality, its acknowledgment of the part language plays in creating the world. Orton's understanding and manipulation of that language is at the center of his plays; it is, roughly speaking, what his plays are about. Orton's language calls attention to discourse, revealing an understanding that language creates the world rather than being just the best or most accurate way of representing it. Orton often seems literally trapped within worlds created by texts, within dominant discourses, and from the inside he tries to dismantle these linguistic systems to allow spaces for dissonant and dissident kinds of meaning. This process of citing discourses, and then taking a writerly /critical position relative to those discourses, is what I would like to describe as the epigrammatic, and it is this which connects Orton to that other great epigrammatic writer, Oscar Wilde, and resulted in Orton's sobriquet "the Oscar Wilde of Welfare State gentility." The best and plainest expression of the concerns and mechanisms of the epiModern Drama, 40 (1997) II 12 FRANCESCA COPPA grammatic occurs in Orton's first play, The Ruffian on the Stair, and I think that it would not be entirely wrongheaded to read all of Orton's plays through this first text. The situation is based on Pinter's "intruder" dramas, and is filled with concerns about "the room," though Orton later tried to disassociate himself from what he called "the now out-dated 'mystery' school - vide early Pinter.,,2 Wilson arrives at the apartment of Joyce and Mike, wanting to rent a room that does not exist. Joyce is unnerved by the young man's repeated, and often vaguely violent, appearances. It turns out that Mike has killed Wilson's brother, with whom Wilson was having an incestuous (and homosexual) love affair. He is grief-stricken and angry and intends, by worming his way into their home, to provoke Mike into murdering him, thereby exposing him as a murderer. All of the critical readings of The Ruffian On The Stair have focused on Wilson's suicidal impulse as the major plot motivation: C.W.E. Bigsby goes so far as to call Ruffian a play "concerned with the efforts of one character to fool another into collaborating in his own suicide."3 And while Wilson clearly wants Mike to kill him ("Don't miss, will you? I don't want to be injured. I want to be dead."4) I think that it is wrong to assume that suicide is his primary motivation. First of all, Wilson doesn't just want to be killed, he wants to be murdered - and he wants to be murdered by Mike. He hopes that his murder by Mike will accomplish several things. First, it will remove Wilson from a situation which he now finds unbearable - living without his brother! lover. Second, it will get Mike into trouble with the authorities. But third, and I think, most importantly, Wilson wants to tell his story, to have his life and his meaning acknowledged. Put simply, Wilson is killed in an attempt to break into dominant discourses from which he is excluded, for expressing that which society does not want expressed. His death, I would argue, is the consequence of this telling; his success in provoking Mike into killing him therefore...

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