The Orton Diaries

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The life and death of Joe Orton, and his startlingly autobiographical plays, are matters I have steadfastly avoided for four decades.

Joe Orton Life and Work Joe Orton Life and Work

As we encounter the admission ‘I’ve never seen a corpse before,’ we reflect that Loot is fantasy and suddenly catch a glimpse of Orton writing more than the truth, or less than the truth. This is presumed to be a reference to Orton's description of his promiscuity; the diary contains numerous incidents of cottaging in public lavatories and other casual sexual encounters. Orton's shocking murder is too easily made the biographical focus for discussion of his plays, devoted as they are to the grotesque, the perverse, and the violent. There, the kinds of truth that Orton was uniquely equipped to tell couldn’t possibly be told – merely gestured at, flamboyantly.Halliwell was seven years older than Orton; they quickly formed a strong relationship and became lovers. Their bodies were discovered late the following morning, when a chauffeur arrived at the door of their Noel Road flat in Islington to collect Orton for a meeting with director Richard Lester to discuss filming options on Up Against It, an unproduced script by Orton, written in 1967 for the Beatles. Before taking the 22 nembutals which killed him, Halliwell left a suicide note: ‘If you read his diary all will be explained.

Joe Why I blame myself for the murder of Sixties playwright Joe

It also, above all, means saying more than is the case, and, as far as the human heart is concerned, more than we feel.

Elon Musk warns AI is 'one of the biggest threats' to humanity as he joins world leaders at Bletchley Park. His father committed suicide in 1949 by inhaling coal-gas in a gas oven; Halliwell was the first to find the body the following morning, but he "stepped over the body, put the kettle on, made a cup of tea and had a shave" before he reported the death. The brain that had conceived some of the most original black comedies of their age was splattered on the walls and ceiling.

The Story of Joe · LRB 4 December 1986 Craig Raine · The Story of Joe · LRB 4 December 1986

In Loot, a dead mother’s teeth function briefly as castanets – a macabre comic prop to match the glass eye which rolls around disturbingly. La muerte de su madre, su familia y sus amigos, incluido su amante que se suicidó después de machacarle los sesos, no le preocupan mucho. Elsewhere, he cheers up Kenneth Williams, who is ‘low and depressed’, and criticises him on another occasion for possible tactlessness – talking too freely in front of his own mother. And it was there, in 1966, that I, then London's youngest film and theatre critic, first met Joe Orton, whose fourth play, Loot, was attracting packed houses in the West End.

Adrift in a world run by monstrous tweed-suited women in thick leather brogues, three men decide to start a worldwide revolution to overthrow the matriarchy. A twenty-year silence indicates incest rather than homosexuality and, increasingly, the friend looks more and more like a ‘friend’, a fiction to deflect blame. Orton's once controversial farce What The Butler Saw was staged in the West End in 1969, more than 18 months after his death.

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made no attempt to disguise his open interest in me when I was invited to a meal of fishcakes and baked beans in their claustrophobic and creepy Islington bedsitter. Halliwell had felt increasingly threatened and isolated by Orton's success, and had come to rely on antidepressants and barbiturates. Piecing together the writing styles, Stevens realised that Williams appeared to be channelling different personalities as he wrote.

She invited Joe to come alone, without Kenneth, to a grand party at which he was to meet theatrical luminaries such as Vivien Leigh, Emlyn Williams and Harold Pinter. He got his wish: the author of barbed, subversive comedies such as Entertaining Mr Sloane and Loot was murdered in 1967 at the age of 34 by his lover Kenneth Halliwell. The diaries chronicle frankly and hilariously the literary successes (capped with an Evening Standard Award and overtures from the Beatles), the rejection of all conventions, and the astonishing sexual adventures (at his mother's funeral. Rishi Sunak and US Vice President Kamala Harris meet and agree on Israel's right to defend itself - and vow.