Joe Orton

There's a film version of Loot, and apparently a later (87 or something) film version of 'Butler' but haven't seen that. The Loot film, is, meh...he's a hard dramatist to capture, I think.

I've only seen a couple of good performances of his plays - Loot at the Lyric in the 90s which was just unbelievable, I thought the guy in front of me was going to have a heart attack, literally - what Orton said about locking the audience in the auditorium and shooting them kinda came true - and there was a Butler at the National about 10 years back I think which was equally good. He's very good at momentum when it's performed right, you get this weird giddiness from nothing making sense. When it's done badly it's just the worst thing in the world.

I said this about him a while back in an interview :

"Orton was the enfant terrible of the 60s’ “angry young men.” He’s probably best known now for being bludgeoned to death with a hammer by his lover. His published diaries are very sexually explicit, so his life has been remembered much more than his work. I’d reiterate that the sole reason for doing this project was a random act, but from that, I’ve looked at different meanings of what I’m doing and how it pans out. Orton’s work isn’t remembered so much; it’s been castrated and when his work is displayed in theatres, it’s very reactionary, it’s always set in the 60s, it’s always given a particular time frame—which isn’t necessarily the case. He’s been linked with the 60s forevermore. By my taking his work and reworking it, it places it back within the experimental tradition from which he came. "

and I think that still stands, his biography - and the biography of alot of queers, by necessity I guess, tends to overshadow their work - there's a political angle for that as well I think but that's for another place - but his biographical narrative is so strong that it tends to be the most important thing about him now. I wonder what he would have thought about that.

I'm not sure he was brilliant but he certainly has the ability to be very, very funny. I didn't like Head to Toe much and there have been re-issues of earlier volumes of his collaborative work with Halliwell but I haven't bothered with them, I sorta overdosed on him as you can imagine.

My favourite play of his is The Ruffian on The Stair, it's kindof a Ghosts of the Civil Dead type scenario - one agent of chaos gets thrown into a mix - and it's a very sweet, tender play given its underlying violence. I really like that one, and although I havent seen it or read it for a while I think it would still stand.

I'm not sure he's still relevant, no, it's very hard to re-imagine him, he kinda got pickled by productions of his productions. Or pickled by the powers that be, depending on how paranoid you are.

IdleRich said:

Well yeah, I do think he's relevant really, otherwise I wouldn't have started the thread. It's the tantalising bits of script (and re-writes) that you get in Prick Up Your Ears that have really whetted my appetite to see proper productions of his stuff. The "agent of chaos" thing is talked about a lot in the book and apparently occurs in a lot of the plays. One of them was based on this guy I think

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Challenor

For a long time Challenor was the golden boy of the press until it was revealed that hiis incredible string of results was due to planting evidence, beating suspects until they confessed and generally fitting people up for crimes they didn't commit.
Oh yeah, you're right about the way he died overshadowing his life of course, I didn't mention it in the first thing to try and steer away from that but of course anyone who knows who he is knows about that anyway.

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Yeah I always really loved Challenor's 'Boo the Queen?' line.

I always thought it was interesting that McLaren/Westwood had those Orton 'Prick UP Your Ears' T-shirts. There's a good website here :

http://rockpopfashion.com/blog/?p=79

about those with some links to other good sites.

It's just so hard to separate - and I guess one shouldn't try - but to separate out Orton the writer from Orton the IT, I mean his life as documented was just so immense that I find it hard.

Why do you think he's still relevant, Rich, anyone?