If Joe Orton were still alive, he'd be 78. As his biographer John Lahr wrote, he expected to die young, but he wrote his plays to last. Battered to death by his lover Kenneth Halliwell when he was only 34, Orton's afterlife on the stage has now lasted nearly half a century, while his actual career as a successful writer spanned less than five years. It's tempting but futile to imagine what might have happened to him had he escaped Halliwell's hammer and lived on into our era. Would he have become a theatrical knight, a pillar of the establishment, a national gay icon, a revered guest at National Theatre platforms and an occasional panellist on Any Questions? I rather doubt it -- he was far too dangerous and amoral.
Lahr defines him as a satirist, but in my book a satirist has to believe in some kind of positive values; Orton didn't. If one has to label him, I would call him a stylist; Firbank and Wilde were among his masters, and his true originality as a dramatist lies not in his use of plot or character but in his manipulation of language. Paradoxically, his plays are sometimes funnier on the page than on the stage. Language is the least important element of farce, but the most important element in Orton. Like Pinter, he wrote plays that are timeless, even though they are set firmly in the 1960s, that most interesting and socially mobile of decades, when the British establishment's moral codes started to come apart at the seams. 'The old whore society lifted up her skirts, and the stench was pretty foul,' Orton wrote after his prison sentence in 1962 for defacing library books. Although he wasn't primarily a political writer, Orton would have loved this week's hilarious confrontation between MPs and the Met's finest detectives, the spiritual heirs of his great comic creation Inspector Truscott. Does this make him a realist? That's a tricky question; Orton was insistent that his plays had to be staged with absolute realism, played straight with the minimum of comic mugging. He wanted Loot, one of his masterpieces, to be played more in the style of Pinter's The Homecoming than I Love Lucy.
For anyone fascinated by Orton, there's a rare chance to see a double bill of two of his lesser known works, The Ruffian on the Stair and The Erpingham Camp, at the Greenwich Playhouse. First twinned together on stage by the Royal Court in 1967 under the title Crimes of Passion, these were originally written for radio and television respectively. Never having seen either play before, I found it a highly rewarding evening. The Ruffian on the Stair, Orton's first ever performed work, clearly foreshadows the themes of Entertaining Mr Sloane and Loot, with a sexually ambiguous and amoral intruder, a pious Roman Catholic and a sexually frustrated woman. Director Mario Chiorando and her three actors correctly play it straight, but some of the play's possibilities aren't fully explored. Rebecca Hands-Wicks plays Joyce convincingly as a terrified housewife, but doesn't suggest this ex-prostitute's sexual frustration with her husband or the underlying attraction she feels for the handsome young intruder Wilson who inveigles himself into her flat. 'Coming here and playing me up. What do you mean by it? It's disgusting.' There's an erotic, inviting subtext to Joyce's reproaches which unfortunately goes missing. As Wilson, Jack Brackstone-Brown sounds too middle class to capture the fake gentility of this upwardly mobile working class hairdresser. He has some of the menace, but none of the verbal precision required to deliver Orton's perfectly honed sub-Wildean epigrams to maximum effect. What's missing here is the style, which is too conversational and informal. 'Victoria is a different place entirely. In the summer it has a character of its own. Are you a Londoner?' This is the kind of line which could have come straight out of The Importance of Being Earnest.
The Erpingham Camp, perhaps because of its origins as a television play, is closer to a mainstream farce and depends less on verbal style than most of Orton's work. In this production, though some of the actors can't resist the temptation to overdo it and play 'funny', there's an excellent performance by Barry Clarke as Erpingham, the holiday camp director who turns a minor protest by his customers into a full-scale rebellion. He's the archetypal authority figure whose intransigence leads to disaster and plunges his kingdom into glorious anarchy. Erpingham is a first cousin of characters in the Carry On and St Trinian's films. As an attempt to create a Brechtian political parable, the play doesn't really cut the mustard, though Orton's mischievous flair for verbal paradox shines through in lines such as 'I find a clerical face always inspires confidence at a gathering of semi-nude women' and 'There'll be some unexpected visits to the pre-natal clinic after tonight'. The physical comedy in this production is unrelentingly vigorous and precise, though inevitably some of most delicious lines don't get time to breathe. There's good backup from Chris Prior as the camp's less-than-holy padre.
If someone other than Orton had written The Ruffian on the Stair and The Erpingham Camp, they probably wouldn't be on anyone's list of revivals. But he did, and this double bill is well worth seeing to learn more about one of the 20th century's most original playwrights. It's on until August 7.
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