History of England 1-6

It was likely, too, that the theatre was for rich patrons. The dominant item on the early-Sixties stage was still the kitchen sink. The dark, the ‘gritty’, the consciously inelegant, were paramount, just as affluent audiences expected and required. When a shift occurred, it did so teasingly.

Joe Orton was born plain ‘John’, of immaculately workingclass stock. After training as an actor, he met Kenneth Halliwell, an aspiring novelist. When Orton and Halliwell appeared in her office to discuss their joint novel, their prospective agent, Peggy Ramsay, was left with one clear impression. ‘Kenneth was the writer, John was basically his pretty and vivacious boyfriend.’ Yet it was the consort who was ultimately to wear the crown. Unlike his lover, Orton had never particularly wanted to be a writer, and this lack of vocation counted in his favour. It was writing rather than being a writer that appealed to him.

His first play, Entertaining Mr Sloane, appeared to owe much to the kitchen sink drama of the Fifties. It was set in a dank suburban household, with little in the way of glamour and a large rubbish tip outside. Kath and Ed, siblings in middle age, live with their father, Kemp. Enter Mr Sloane, a young workingclass man to whom both brother and sister find themselves irresistibly attracted. Kemp is suspicious and hostile, with some justification, for the callow ingénu of the first act soon reveals himself to be a cool, manipulative sociopath. Having impregnated Kath, he goes on to beat Kemp to death when the latter identifies him as the murderer of his former employer. Although the death is strictly manslaughter, Kath and Ed succeed in blackmailing Sloane, and he is forced to let them ‘share’ him. The unforgiving austerity of the plot is, however, belied by the play’s idiom. The flat cadences of the early scenes recede and a puckish, Wildean note intrudes. When Sloane asks whether he can be present at the baby’s birth, Ed assures him: ‘I think to be present at the conception is all any reasonable man need ask.’

Buoyed by the generosity of Terence Rattigan, the play performed well and profitably. Only a few days after the opening night, however, the papers received a letter from one ‘Edna Welthorpe (Miss)’. Indignant at the ‘filth’ displayed, she concluded that ‘today’s young playwrights take it upon themselves to insult the ordinary, decent public … the ordinary, decent public will shortly strike back – now!’ The solecism at the end was the master touch, for of course Miss Welthorpe was none other than Joe Orton himself. The forename was offered in tribute to Rattigan, who always maintained that ‘Aunt Edna’ was his ideal audience member.

Loot, Orton’s next performed work, was a black farce in which Inspector Truscott, a cheerfully corrupt policeman, investigates a burglary, only to pocket much of the titular loot before sending an entirely innocent widower to jail. The kitchen sink had yielded centre stage to the coffin, where the casket holds the stash. When faced with the proposition that it is the business of the police to protect the honest and decent, Truscott remarks, ‘I don’t know where you get these slogans, sir. You must read them on hoardings.’ This Wildean strain dances with still greater abandon in Orton’s later plays. What the Butler Saw was performed posthumously. Orton’s finest work, depicting the gradual unravelling of sanity and justice in a psychiatric ward, it ends with the cast, traduced, abused, ravished and raving, ascending a stair into the light, carrying the ‘missing parts’ of a statue of Winston Churchill. Every kind of ‘perversion’ is gleefully displayed for the audience’s disgust and delectation.