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Joe Orton - Orton as playwright

Joe Orton - Orton as playwright: Encyclopedia II - Joe Orton - Orton as playwright

In the early 1960s Orton began to write plays. He wrote his last novel in 1961 (Head to Toe) and soon after had writing accepted. In 1963 the BBC paid £65 for the radio play The Boy Hairdresser, broadcast on August 31, 1964, as The Ruffian on the Stair. It was substantially rewritten for the stage in 1966. Orton revelled in his achievement and poured out new works. He had completed Entertaining Mr Sloane by the time The Ruffian on the Stair was broadcast. He sent a copy to the theatre agent Peggy Ra ...

Joe Orton: Encyclopedia II - Joe Orton - Orton as playwright

Joe Orton - Orton as playwright

In the early 1960s Orton began to write plays. He wrote his last novel in 1961 (Head to Toe) and soon after had writing accepted. In 1963 the BBC paid £65 for the radio play The Boy Hairdresser, broadcast on August 31, 1964, as The Ruffian on the Stair. It was substantially rewritten for the stage in 1966.

Orton revelled in his achievement and poured out new works. He had completed Entertaining Mr Sloane by the time The Ruffian on the Stair was broadcast. He sent a copy to the theatre agent Peggy Ramsay in December 1963. She was quick to appreciate its qualities and sent it to Michael Codron of the New Arts Theatre, who took up the play for an April/May run in January 1964. The play premiered on May 6, 1964, reviews ranging from praise to outrage. Certain influential theatre figures such as Sir Terence Rattigan ensured his work was performed, and there was a clear expectation of good things to come.

Entertaining Mr Sloane lost money in its three week run, but Rattigan invested £3,000 and the play transferred to Wyndham's Theatre in the West End at the end of June and to the Queen's Theatre in October. Sloane tied for first in the Variety Critics' Poll for best new play and Orton came second for most promising playwright. Sloane was being performed in New York (directed by Alan Schneider, it did very poorly), Spain, Israel and Australia within a year as well as being made into a film and a television play.

The chronology of Orton's works becomes a little confusing here, as his next major success, Loot, was written later but performed earlier than the two television plays, The Good and Faithful Servant and The Erpingham Camp. Hence material that seems less Ortonesque, a backwards step in development and skill, is misleadingly positioned.

Orton's next performed work was Loot. The first draft was written between June and October 1964 and entitled Funeral Games, a title Orton would drop for Halliwell's suggestion but would later reuse. The play is a wild parody of detective fiction, adding the blackest farce and jabs at established ideas on death, the police, religion and justice. Orton offered the play to Codron in October 1964 and it underwent sweeping rewrites before it was judged fit for the West End - for example Inspector Truscott has a mere eight lines in the initial first act. Codron had manoevred Orton into meeting his colleague Kenneth Williams in August 1964, they were "immediately sympatico" and Orton reworked Loot with Williams in mind for Truscott. His other inspiration for the role was DS Harold Challenor, the utter incompatibility of these two sources being lost to Orton at first.

With the success of Sloane evident, Loot was hurried into pre-production, despite the obvious flaws. Rehearsals began in January 1965 with a six-week tour culminating in a West End debut planned. The play opened in Cambridge on February 1 to disastrous and scathing reviews, and not for the content but for the plot, the acting, the bright white set, the entire quality of the piece. Orton, at odds with director Peter Wood over the plot (or lack of same), still tore at the play producing 133 pages of new material to replace or add to the original ninety. The cast were demoralized in rehearsal and uneven and tentative on stage. They were, however, impressed by Orton's energy and efforts. The play staggered on to more poor reviews in Brighton, Oxford, Bournemouth, Manchester, and finally Wimbledon in mid-March. "Loot was a dead horse, but it continued to be flogged." Orton retired from the fray for a promiscuous, hashish-filled, eighty-day holiday in Tangier, Morocco.

In January 1966 Loot was revived, with Oscar Lewenstein taking up an option. Before his production it had a short run (April 11-23) at the University Theatre, Manchester. Orton's growing experience led him to cut over six-hundred lines, raising the tempo and improving the characters' interactions. Directed by Braham Murray, with a more sympathetic and less abstract set, the tuned play garnered more favourable reviews. Lewenstein was still a little cool and put the London production in a "sort of Off-West End theatre," the Jeanetta Cochrane Theatre in Bloomsbury, under the direction of the clever and thrusting Charles Marowitz. Orton continued his habit of clashing with directors with Marowitz, but the additional cuts they agreed improved the play further. The London premiere was September 27, 1966, the reviews producing "stunned delight" in Orton. Loot moved to the Criterion Theatre, Holborn in November, raising Orton's confidence to new heights, "a weird, thrilling, slightly unnerving state of grace," while he was in the middle of writing What the Butler Saw.

Loot went on to win several awards - which had a pleasing effect on the box office - and firmly established Orton's fame. He sold the film rights for £25,000 although he was certain it would flop; it did, and Loot on Broadway repeated the failure of Sloane. Orton was still on an absolute high and in the next ten months revised The Ruffian on the Stair and The Erpingham Camp for the stage as a double called Crimes of Passion, wrote Funeral Games, the screenplay Up Against It for the Beatles, and worked on What the Butler Saw.

The Good and Faithful Servant is a play of transition for Orton. A one-act television play, it was completed by June 1964 but first broadcast by Associated-Rediffusion on April 6, 1967. With its low-key bitterness and regret it is tame and naturalistic compared to the joyful macabre heights of his later modern farces, including that which premiered earlier.

The Erpingham Camp, Orton's take on The Bacchae, written through mid-1965 and offered to Rediffusion in October of that year, was broadcast on June 27, 1966.

Funeral Games is the real linking work between Loot and What the Butler Saw. It was written and re-written (four times) in July-November, 1966. Created for a Yorkshire Television series, The Seven Deadly Virtues, Orton's play dealt with charity - especially Christian charity - in a mad confusion of adultery and murder.

In March 1967 Orton and Halliwell had intended another extended holiday in North Africa – Libya on this occasion. The relationship between them had deteriorated so far that they returned home after barely a day. Orton was working hard, energised and happy; Halliwell was increasingly depressed, argumentative and plagued with mystery ailments.