Orton's work, life prove inseparable

PRICK UP YOUR EARS: THE BIOGRAPHY OF JOE ORTON, by John Lahr; Knopf, 302 pp., $15.

By Wilma Salisbury

In 1967, British playwright Joe Orton was nearing the peak of his career. His plays, "Entertaining Mr. Sloane" and "Loot," had been successfully produced. He had won an important theater prize in London. He was working on a screenplay for the Beatles. He was putting the finishing touches on his most brilliant comedy, "What the Butler Saw." He was preparing to write a historical farce titled "Prick Up Your Ears." In British drama circles, he was regarded as the most promising comedy playwright of the era, successor to Noel Coward, Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw.

Then, on August 9, 1967, Orton was brutally murdered by his homosexual lover, Kenneth Halliwell. The two men were found in the tiny flat they had shared for more than a decade. Orton, 34, had been bashed in the head nine times with a hammer. Halliwell, 41, was dead from a drug overdose.

John Lahr's critical biography begins with Orton's violent death, an event that brought him more worldwide publicity than anything he did in life. Lahr then works backward, setting the scene for the murder and showing how the relationship between the two men had slowly deteriorated.

They had met as students at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

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Together, they had started their careers as writers, co-authoring an autobiographical novel, The Boy Hairdresser. Together, they had committed a crime: the defacing of library books. For this childishness, they had been sentenced to six months in separate prisons. The sentence was so severe, contended Orton, "because we were queers."

The unrepentant Orton had grown up in the gray flatness of industrial Leicester. He had had a miserable relationship with his working-class parents, whom he later used as models for some of the most perverse characters in his plays.

Halliwell, by contrast, had been a pampered only child. At 11, he suffered the traumatic experience of seeing his warm, doting mother choke to death before his eyes. Ten years later, his father committed suicide by putting his head in an

oven.

Orton and Halliwell were angry young men of the 1960s. Halliwell, a failure in his work and his personal life, never found a focus for his rage. Orton let his anger flow through the creative channel of his searing comic talent.

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John Lahr novelist, theater critic and biographer of his father Bert (Notes on a Cowardly Lion)

takes the premise that Orton's art and life were inseparable. To document his theory, he integrates passages from Orton's plays and novels with real events from his life and revealing excerpts from his diaries.

British playright Joe Orton and his biographer (inset), John Lahr.

Orton's comedies are filled with black humor, extreme brutality, outrageous flaunting of social taboos and deep feelings of sexual guilt, but are tame in comparison to his diaries. He was flagrantly promiscuous, and in the diaries wrote in gleeful pornographic detail about his sordid encounters.

Besides telling the story of Orton's life and pointing out its reflection in the playwright's work, Lahr writes critically of the plays. He gives plot synopses and analyzes characters and structures.

Because Orton's works are not yet well-known in the United States, the American reader lacks a complete frame of reference for Lahr's probing comments. Nonetheless, the author gives sufficient information about the plays and the man to sustain interest and to support his conclusion that Orton, despite the squalor of his life and the horror of his death, left in his works “a heritage of laughter created out of a lifetime's hunger for revenge.' Wilma Salisbury writes about. music, dance and people for The Plain Dealer.

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