What a wonderful piece. When I’m feeling blue, I look up the images of the books which Orwell and Halliwell defiled. They never fail to reduce me to tears of laughter. http://www.joeorton.org/Pages/Joe_Orton_Gallery14.html
What a great piece . This is why I took the part of Edna. Who incidentally also uses those toilets & emerges equally fluttered . Haha. Thanks for your insight into the genius that was Joe.
Richard Riheed
1 year ago
Good article, thank you. From the 70s/80s onwards British theatre as been dominated by the ideological left – Barker, Brenton, Hare, Churchill, Stafford-Clark etc, etc. LIkewise, they would only want to work with individuals who were immersed in the same echo chambers as themselves. And like today, when the message is more important than the quality of work, the result is poor writing: putting people off from the theatre or reading pc novels.
Jet Jet
1 year ago
Remember that Orton was an admitted child rapist so he may well not have been on the same side of the debate now that you assume he would.
Paedophiles will often take up whatever politics are most likely to enable their offending.
In the 70s and 80s that was liberalism and their individualism, now it’s wokeism and their censorship.
Yes he was a vile individual with the behaviours of a child, seen as ‘cool’ or ‘courageous’ by those who weren’t subject to them, like voyeurs at an orgy.
Very true. I remember watching ‘p***k Up Your Ears’ in a cinema at the time of its release. The majority of those present found it very funny when Orton and Halliwell are messing around with Arab boys in (I think) Morocco and Orton tells Halliwell how ready they are to give blow jobs. It seems that there are plenty of people who are prepared to forgive one of their own when it comes to abusing children. Especially if they are boys and of another race.
Well done for pointing this out. I have seen some of Mr Orton’s works; they are made to shock and so often don’t as the play-goers are expecting it. It’s not so much the subject matter that I find distastful as the fact that there are rarely (if ever) any characters with whom I can sympathise; therefore, the plays become intellectual exercises in just how far can a playwrite go, rather than revealing anything about the human condition or society.
Bill Wainwright
1 year ago
Thankfully we still have David Mamet, as alive and observant as ever. His 1992 play, Oleanna, was subsequently made into a movie with William H. Macy. It was a harbinger of the woke victim SJW times in which we now all live.
Roger Tilbury
1 year ago
Excellent article, esp. about toilets. The Bouc Blanc restaurant on the ski slopes above Courchevel has a single toilet with 2 urinals on the left-hand wall as you go in and 2 cubicles on the wall facing you. If you are happy to use the urinals and one is free you walk past the queue of people waiting for a cubicle, but the ladies in it don’t bat an eyelid, probably because you’d have to make quite an effort to see any genitalia of whatever type of the users of said urinals.
What a wonderful piece. When I’m feeling blue, I look up the images of the books which Orwell and Halliwell defiled. They never fail to reduce me to tears of laughter. http://www.joeorton.org/Pages/Joe_Orton_Gallery14.html
What a great piece . This is why I took the part of Edna. Who incidentally also uses those toilets & emerges equally fluttered . Haha. Thanks for your insight into the genius that was Joe.
Good article, thank you. From the 70s/80s onwards British theatre as been dominated by the ideological left – Barker, Brenton, Hare, Churchill, Stafford-Clark etc, etc. LIkewise, they would only want to work with individuals who were immersed in the same echo chambers as themselves. And like today, when the message is more important than the quality of work, the result is poor writing: putting people off from the theatre or reading pc novels.
Remember that Orton was an admitted child rapist so he may well not have been on the same side of the debate now that you assume he would.
Paedophiles will often take up whatever politics are most likely to enable their offending.
In the 70s and 80s that was liberalism and their individualism, now it’s wokeism and their censorship.
Yes he was a vile individual with the behaviours of a child, seen as ‘cool’ or ‘courageous’ by those who weren’t subject to them, like voyeurs at an orgy.
Very true. I remember watching ‘p***k Up Your Ears’ in a cinema at the time of its release. The majority of those present found it very funny when Orton and Halliwell are messing around with Arab boys in (I think) Morocco and Orton tells Halliwell how ready they are to give blow jobs. It seems that there are plenty of people who are prepared to forgive one of their own when it comes to abusing children. Especially if they are boys and of another race.
Well done for pointing this out. I have seen some of Mr Orton’s works; they are made to shock and so often don’t as the play-goers are expecting it. It’s not so much the subject matter that I find distastful as the fact that there are rarely (if ever) any characters with whom I can sympathise; therefore, the plays become intellectual exercises in just how far can a playwrite go, rather than revealing anything about the human condition or society.
Thankfully we still have David Mamet, as alive and observant as ever. His 1992 play, Oleanna, was subsequently made into a movie with William H. Macy. It was a harbinger of the woke victim SJW times in which we now all live.
Excellent article, esp. about toilets. The Bouc Blanc restaurant on the ski slopes above Courchevel has a single toilet with 2 urinals on the left-hand wall as you go in and 2 cubicles on the wall facing you. If you are happy to use the urinals and one is free you walk past the queue of people waiting for a cubicle, but the ladies in it don’t bat an eyelid, probably because you’d have to make quite an effort to see any genitalia of whatever type of the users of said urinals.
Pretty standard to see mixed toilets in France – sometimes with a flimsy partition between urinals and cubicles.