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Joe Orton – Photograph by Lewis Morley.
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Playwright Joe Orton skewered English social and sexual pretensions in Entertaining Mr. Sloane, which Roundabout revives this winter at the Laura Pels, with Alec Baldwin.
by Randy Gener
He was no ordinary Joe: During his short but meteoric career as the baddest queer of the post-World War II British stage, playwright Joe Orton (1933–1967) was getting it both ways. Although he had come from the working-class ghetto and spent time in prison, he rubbed elbows with London's fashionable circle of closeted aristocrats and theatrical big boys. But while these aesthetes—Noel Coward, Somerset Maugham, Mordaunt Shairp (The Greenbay Tree), and Terence Rattigan—had mastered the fancy art of suggestion without speaking the unspeakable, Orton's renegade comedies brazenly rejected sexual prudery, moralistic attitudes, and bourgeois respectability.
Orton was cute, straight-acting, and successful. Always delighted to shock people, he promiscuously cruised the public toilets of north London in search of anonymous sex, even though he had been shacked up with a man, his lover and mentor Kenneth Halliwell, for almost 16 years. Meanwhile, the three major plays on which his notoriety continues to stand (Entertaining Mr. Sloane, Loot, and What the Butler Saw) regularly prowled the commercial stages of London's West End.
Tough Love
The contradictions are rife and fascinating. Orton was the most visibly gay mainstream playwright of the 1960s, and yet Orton never portrayed homosexual love onstage. In fact, he never really wrote what we would now call “gay plays,” and his dramatic concoctions are notably vague or indifferent to gay sexual politics. Orton daringly questioned dramatic and sexual conventions prior to the advent of the “gay movement,” which most mark in this country by the Stonewall Riots of 1969. Insisting, for instance, that there should not be “anything queer or camp or odd about” the relationships of Hal and Dennis in Loot, Orton wrote, “Americans see homosexuality in terms of fag and drag. This isn't my vision of the universal brotherhood. They must be perfectly ordinary boys who happen to be f***ing each other. Nothing could be more natural. I won't have the Great American Queen brought into it.”
By being photographed in his uniform of leather jacket and white T-shirt, Orton projected an erotic image of tough masculinity that countered the popular stereotype of gay men as effeminate, soft, affluent, and weak. “I mean there's absolutely no reason why a writer shouldn't be as tough as a bricklayer,” Orton said. But while he imagined himself as an outlaw and intruder—remarkably similar to the character of the teenage hustler Sloane who, at one point in Entertaining Mr. Sloane, is dressed up in leather pants by the discreet middle-aged homosexual Ed—Orton's frank and overt representations of gayness have disappointed many progressive thinkers and gay scholars who have recently argued that his work is less than revolutionary. In his personal life, Orton was openly gay. In his plays, masculine men—Sloane, Hal and Dennis, and Nick in What the Butler Saw—are never exclusively gay.
“One does not kill by anger, but by laughter.”
- Joe Orton
The 1964 play, Entertaining Mr. Sloane (Roundabout's revival starts performances on February 17, directed by Scott Ellis and starring Alec Baldwin, Chris Carmack, Richard Easton, and Jan Maxwell) signaled the beginning of Orton's active years as a dramatist, which lasted until 1967 when he was murdered in bed. (Halliwell bashed his 34-year-old partner's skull nine times with a hammer in their London apartment and then killed himself with an overdose of 22 Nembutal sleeping pills.) Since that first stage success, Orton styled his roughhouse rebellion along the lines of the British theatre's prototypical Angry Young Men. The crucial twist, however, was that he was angry about the repressive effects of puritanical family values and institutional authority on gay men's sexual aspirations. He manifested that queer rage in the form of anarchic comedies, which almost always spilled into murder and violence. Orton's scripts consistently flirted with illegal acts and the themes of incest, pederasty, and sodomy.
Theatre censorship was not abolished in Britain until 1968. Gay liberation was around the corner: 13 days before his grisly murder, the 1967 reform bill, which decriminalized private consensual sex between British men over the age of 21, went into effect. Two days after the bill had become law, Orton happened to come upon a straight couple innocently conversing and enjoying each other's company out in public. He remarked in his diary:
I saw a young boy, blond and v[ery] healthy-looking, filling a bucket with water on the promenade. As he turned the tap off he looked up. Our eyes met. A great spasm of rage overtook me. I find lust an emotion indistinguishable from anger. Or, at least, anger predominates when I see something I can't have. I feel I may run mad one day and commit rape.
Legal emancipation could not quash or appease Orton's lifetime of anger—it was too deeply ingrained. His concern was not social propriety or political correctness but an uncertain compound of metaphysical vacuity and sexual aggression, whose ultimate residence may be the psyche. The war of irony and ridicule against heterosexual values that pervade all of his comic works represented the bitter, painful consciousness of a gay man whose normalcy was always put in question—it is the defiance of a citizen whose sexuality had been deemed outside the law for all but the very last days of his life.
A Ruffian Start
Born John Kingsley Orton in the drab, sooty industrial city of Leicester, England in 1933, Joe Orton never wanted you to forget that he came from the gutter. He grew up an asthmatic and lonely boy whom his family members thought (save for his harridan of a mother) was going to amount to nothing. He was a mediocre student. He couldn't hold down a job. In his late teens, however, he showed some pluck: To escape the stifling boredom and banality of his milieu, he joined local amateur dramatic clubs. He lost his strong regional accent that handicapped his aspirations for a career in acting by taking elocution classes. To improve his physique and quite likely his chances with the same sex, he took up bodybuilding. None of his family knew he was gay until after he died.
The seeds of Orton's playwriting were planted during a ten-year literary apprenticeship under Halliwell. Soon after nabbing an acting scholarship for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1951, the 18-year-old Orton moved into a north London apartment with the then 25-year-old man, who encouraged Orton to study literature and to write. The two bohemians lived frugally, subsisting on Halliwell's money or on their income from odd jobs. Mostly, they refused to work.
They did collaborate on many unpublished novels between 1953 and 1963, mainly literary pastiches of prose stylists whose epigrammatic qualities they considered camp and frothy. They knew of Wilde, of course, but they had a bigger interest for the Restoration playwrights William Wycherly and William Congreve, as well as the novelist Jane Austen, whom, Orton and Halliwell felt, was simply too sensitive to adultery, fornication, and promiscuous relations in society to be the prim and proper lady of English legend. Their foremost influence, however, was Ronald Firbank (1886-1926), the ingenious writer and humorist who cast a sardonic eye on high-society Edwardians suffering from ennui and moral decay. It was Firbank's witty, sure-footed indulgences of behavioral excess that Orton and Halliwell most closely imitated in their collaborative fiction.
Even when the two lovers began writing their own solo book efforts, neither had achieved any success. Orton would, in fact, later ransack their novels for ideas and put them into his stage plays, which Halliwell, as Orton's dramaturg and co-conspirator, helped shape and whose punning titles he frequently supplied. Those formative years with Halliwell also inculcated Orton's riotous penchant for pranks and hoaxes. To satirize the disapproving tastes of the suburban middle-class, Orton conceived, in 1958, of the fictional character of “Mrs. Edna Welthorpe,” whom he imagined to be a watchdog of public morals.
During the London theatrical run of Entertaining Mr. Sloane, an outraged “Mrs. Edna” submitted a series of letters to the editor of the The Daily Telegraph, attacking the play as an “endless parade of mental and physical perversion.” She engaged in a public debate over the decency of what she called “a disgusting piece of filth” with “Peter Pinnell,” “John A. Carlsen,” “Alan Crosby”—all pseudonyms fabricated by Orton. The nadir in Orton and Halliwell's rascal activities took place in 1962 when they were both charged with five counts of theft and malicious damage of more than 70 books from the public library. They were fined and sent to prison for six months for stealing books, defacing the cover art, clipping out hundreds of plates and pictures from art books to decorate their cramped apartment, concocting fake jacket blurbs as well as pasting lewd drawings and strange images into books which they returned to the shelves. Standing quietly in the library shadows, Orton would snicker as unsuspecting readers perused the books he had obscenely altered.
Unstable sexuality rules in Orton's zany comedies, and people's sexual appetites are endlessly funny.
Francesca Coppa in Joe Orton: A Casebook suggests that Orton's in-your-face sense of humor may have been a mask. The scrapbook Orton himself created for Entertaining Mr. Sloane has the imposing letters “MR. SLOANE” pasted over “the powerful torso of a muscular man with a gigantic package.” Inside, she reports, a column of newsprint bearing the following quotation was collaged: “I was not nearly so sure of myself as I should have liked, and this made me present a brassy face and pretend to be more hardboiled than I was. I developed a mocking, cynical way of treating events because it prevented them from being too painful.” In an interview when he had become the toast of the West End theatre scene, Orton reasoned that he and Halliwell were imprisoned not for destroying public library property but “because we're queers.”
Sexual Healing
In the artifices of the theatre, where he happily flaunted his thuggish brand of comic irreverence, Joe Orton made a clean break. Because of the sexual permissiveness and the burgeoning gay political awareness of the 1960s, he found that he could fan the flames of scandal, myth, and contradiction—without restraint or guilt. Abandoning novelwriting after his release from prison, Orton increasingly separated himself from Halliwell's tight grip and transfomed himself into a playwright, independently producing scripts that fired up controversy—flames which he himself stoked. At the suggestion of his new literary agent Peggy Ramsey—and to avert a name confusion with the other Angry Young Man, playwright John Osborne—Orton changed his first name from “John” to “Joe.” In the 1964 program for Entertaining Mr. Sloane, the 31-year-old Orton's bio declared that he was 25, and it proudly emphasized that he came out of nowhere, failed in his education, and had a criminal past. He spoke of having been married and divorced. “Is that enough?” he wrote, signing off with a disingenuous question.
The iconoclastic Orton persona was his own best invention. It was also the creation of Kenneth Halliwell. Although he was cast as a grotesque villain by the theatrical establishment long before he created the tragedy that ended both their lives, Halliwell was actually instrumental in helping promulgate the popular sense of the “Ortonesque.” Entertaining Mr. Sloane, a comedy of sexual manners about an amoral hustler who worms his way into the erotic fantasies of a middle-aged brother and sister, brilliantly displays this intensely farcical style, which was characterized by droll word play, an endearing determination to outrage, and an ironic sense of how to subvert the audience's expectations about plot. It is also marked by a sharp-edged disconnect between what the characters say and what they actually do, which during the course of the evening becomes increasingly bizarre and absurd.
In the celebrated last scenes of Entertaining Mr. Sloane, the brother and sister negotiate a deal to make Sloane their sexual plaything. “One does not kill by anger, but by laughter,” Orton said. “Comedy acts out unconscious wishes supposed in daily life.”
Overnight Sensation
The media, always hungry for a new sensation, ate it all up—and in the process created its own version of Orton. The reviewer Ronald Bryden in The Observer in 1966 dubbed Orton as the “Oscar Wilde of Welfare State gentility.” It is a pithy quip, and though one can analyze Orton's plays structurally to show that it actually misses the mark, the argument can be seductive because his last work, What the Butler Saw, was constructed as a parody of The Importance of Being Earnest. In fact, Orton burlesques Wilde. Orton insolently seems to say, “I can do this, old man, and I can do it better!” Although he admired Wilde's play, Orton felt that Wilde led “an appalling life.” In 1967, Orton tried to avoid the comparison when he told the Evening Standard: “Unlike Wilde, I think you should put your genius into your work, not into your life.”
Orton did not want to be cast, like Wilde, as a homosexual martyr. He did not believe in hiding or cowering in the closet. Unfortunately, however, the comparison became firmly cemented with the scandal of Orton's tabloid-style murder at the hands of Halliwell, who had become manic-depressive and lethally envious of Orton's success and insecure of his independence of mind. The passage of time allows us to see today more clearly the homophobia, hypocrisy, and bias that characterize the interpretations of Orton's life and work. Like Wilde, as well as many past tragic figures of homosexual culture that met gruesome deaths, Orton was used by the straight world to stereotype gay life as filled with pathetic debauchery and empty nihilism. Framed by their demise, the biographies of both Wilde and Orton are darkly resonant of the “crime does not pay” ethos: morality tales about doomed lives that the world could not tolerate and that must inevitably implode.
Critical assessments of Orton's works by gay scholars and historians, on the other hand, are similarly slanted; they attack the absence of positive gay role models or the lack of a utopian vision of the homosexual—as if Orton would ever have been interested in winning an award from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. Everyone, gay and straight, has exploited Orton for their own purposes. Everybody is inevitably disappointed.
The “Joe Orton” who struts across Entertaining Mr. Sloane like a horny stud tells a different story. He intrigues because he is so clearly a sex-obsessed product of his time. (Did you know that in 2003 England's Department of National Heritage decided to preserve the public toilet in North London where Orton prowled for sex because of its architecture and theatrical history?) He fascinates because he was oblique enough to have escaped the wrangling of government censors, brave enough to foreground an openly homosexual alternative, and hypermasculine enough to defy the stereotypes of the sensitive queer. He delights because he courted the British intelligentsia: Terence Rattigan himself gave the necessary enhancement money that allowed the immediate transfer of Entertaining Mr. Sloane to London's commercial stage.
The mysterious Sloane is also as clever a theatrical construction as the ruffian dramatist who had unleashed him. He disturbs because he signifies the enigmatic stranger. He is gorgeous, but he has an air of slack menace. The character seems vaguely familiar, because he was clearly devised along the brutally classical lines of the protagonists of Harold Pinter's family-centered dramas like The Homecoming or The Birthday Party. In Sloane, the woman, Kath, is a sex-starved mother looking for both a lover and a son. Her sibling, Ed, is a big brother-type with more than a leather fetish: he can only have sex with the men who also have sex with his sister. A power struggle ensues as they vie for the affections—and the sex—of the young intruder. In this amoral satire, Sloane is neither innocent nor victim; he is both a fantasy come true and a projection of suppressed desires. Comparing Pinter's The Homecoming (1965) to Sloane (1964), Orton wrote in his diary: “Harold, I'm sure, would never share someone sexually. I would. And so Sloane springs from the way I think. The Homecoming doesn't spring from the way Harold thinks.”
Orton's revolution was that he deliberately upset the metaphysical dramas that both straight and gay dramatists liked to play on audiences by blatantly infusing them with an explicit homoerotic charge. He freed the libido on the stage, placing it front and center. Morality is humbug: Anything goes. His work does not conform to the earnestness of gay political ideology (Orton would have balked at gay marriage). Unstable sexuality rules in his zany comedies, and people's sexual appetites are endlessly funny. His naughty joke is that it is perfectly natural for perfectly ordinary boys to have sex, no matter what the gender of their partners.
Entertaining Mr. Sloane, of course, is a take-no-prisoners social comedy, not a manifesto or political tract. “Sex is the only way to infuriate them,” Orton once declared. “Much more f***ing and they'll be screaming hysterics in next to no time.” Desiring commercial success on his queer terms, he lived—and wrote—as if he had nothing to lose. He fabricated comic romps that ripple with sex, anarchy, lust and boys. Like Mr. Sloane, Joe Orton, the dramatist, was fashioned out of truth, fiction, and lies.
Randy Gener, the senior editor of American Theatre magazine, is the author of Love Seats for Virginia Woolf, and other plays.
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