Joe Orton: His Brief Career

JOE ORTON: HIS BRIEF CAREER No BRITISH PLAYWRIGHT SINCE Wilde has earned quite the notoriety Joe Orton won rapidly in the mid-Sixties. Within four years he wrote seven plays for which he was acclaimed, financially rewarded, condemned. Entertaining MT. Sloane set the tone of his brief career. Terence Rattigan called it the best first play he had ever seen, and helped finance a West End run; the 1965 reaction to dirty plays killed it after five months. Paradoxically Orton himself contributed to this backlash under one of his pseudonyms: in a letter to the New Statesman Edna Welthorpe confessed her nauseous disgust over such a display of perverted filth. When Loot won an award as the best play of 1966, Edna and two other disguises argued in Plays and PlayeTs about why the play· should never have won any distinction at all. Indeed Orton did more than write ribald drama; he also needed to live it. I cannot escape the feeling that this need was especially strong in Orton because it allowed him to study his own effects from different, even irreconcilable, stances. (Much the same as in a frankly narcissistic way he loved to oil his skin and pose for physique photographs.) Even before success as a dramatist enriched his cockiness, he deliberately baited society. Though he left school at an early age he turned in later years to educating himself with public books he both read and defaced. "I used to stand in corners after I'd smuggled the doctored books back into the library and then watch people read them. It was very funny, very interesting."! Society didn't think so; it jailed him for six months. What Orton needed at thirty years of age was a more agreeable channel for his iconoclastic inclination. As a rep actor in the early Fifties he had fizzled out after two years with the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and a career as joint novelist with the man he lived with for the last half of his life hadn't prospered. Prison removed Orton from the unsatisfactory view of himself as novelist. Upon release he wrote a one-act play produced by BBe radio in 1964, and adapted later for the stage. "Before I had been vaguely conscious of something rotting somewhere: prison crystallised this. The old whore society really lifted up her skirts and the stench was pretty foul."2 But had Orton's motivation for writing drama really ! "Joe Orton: Interviewed by Giles CQrdon," The Transatlantic Review, 24 (Spring 1967), 9& 2 Quoted by James Fox, "The Life and Death of Joe Orton," The Sunday Times Magazine, 22 Nov. 1970, 49. I am indebted to this article for certain biographical detaiL 413 414 MODERN DRAMA February sprung from such apparent indignation? Here that motivation sounds rather more fashionable than actually responsible for the plays which had already earned him success. For the moment, however, I would like to set this particular point aside. In The Ruffian on the Stair3 Orton managed from the start to temper his iconoclastic hand with controlled understatement. JOYCE. Have you got an appointment today? MIKE. Yes. I'm to be at King's Cross station at eleven. I'm meeting a man in the toilet. If the play is derivative of Pinter as a whole, the homosexual theme is distinctly Orton's. So is the fullness of plot because, unlike Pinter who leaves motive often unexplained, Orton felt a compulsion to clarify events (something he pursued at a frantic pace in later plays). In Ruffian the past is gradually revealed to elucidate the incidents which beset three characters in a one-room flat. A young intruder intends to revenge his brother: a homosexual, it seems, recently run over by a van. The intruder's knowledge of Joyce's past as a whore enables him ultimately to infuriate her common-law -husband (who owns a van), to the point of getting himself shot. Since this was his wish all along, he dies satisfied that the other man must pay for his brother's murder by trapping him with the consequences of his own. Even pared down for stage production the play remains somewhat verbose and...