Joe Orton

John Kingsley Orton (1 January 1933 – 9 August 1967), known by the pen name of Joe Orton, was an English playwright, author, and diarist.

Joe Orton was born on 1 January 1933 at Causeway Lane Maternity Hospital, Leicester, to William Arthur Orton and Elsie Mary Orton (née Bentley).

William worked for Leicester County Borough Council as a gardener and Elsie worked in the local footwear industry until tuberculosis cost her a lung.

At the time of Joe's birth, William and Mary were living with William's family at 261 Avenue Road Extension in Clarendon Park, Leicester.

Joe's younger brother, Douglas, was born in 1935.

That year, the Ortons moved to 9 Fayrhurst Road on the Saffron Lane Estate, a council estate.

Orton's younger sisters, Marilyn and Leonie, were born in 1939 and 1944, respectively.

Orton attended Marriot Road Primary School but failed the eleven-plus exam after extended bouts of asthma, and so took a secretarial course at Clark's College in Leicester from 1945 to 1947.

He began working as a junior clerk for £3 a week.

Orton became interested in performing in theatre around 1949 and joined a number of dramatic societies, including the Leicester Dramatic Society.

While working on amateur productions he was determined to improve his appearance and physique, buying bodybuilding courses, taking elocution lessons.

He was accepted for a scholarship at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in November 1950, and he left the East Midlands for London.

His entrance into RADA was delayed until May 1951 by appendicitis.

Orton met Kenneth Halliwell at RADA in 1951 and moved into a West Hampstead flat with him and two other students that June.

Halliwell was seven years older than Orton; they quickly formed a strong relationship and became lovers.

After graduating, both Orton and Halliwell went into regional repertory work: Orton spent four months in Ipswich as an assistant stage manager; Halliwell in Llandudno, Wales.

Both returned to London and began to write together.

They collaborated on a number of unpublished novels (often imitating Ronald Firbank) with no success at gaining publication.

The rejection of their great hope, The Last Days of Sodom, in 1957 led them to solo works.

From 1957 to 1959, they worked in six-month stretches at Cadbury's to raise money for a new flat; they moved into a small, austere flat at 25 Noel Road in Islington in 1959.

A lack of serious work led them to amuse themselves with pranks and hoaxes.

Orton created the second self "Edna Welthorpe", an elderly theatre snob, whom he later revived to stir controversy over his plays.

Orton chose the name as an allusion to Terence Rattigan's archetypal playgoer "Aunt Edna".

Orton wrote his last novel, The Vision of Gombold Proval (posthumously published as Head to Toe), in 1959.

He later drew on these manuscripts for ideas; many show glimpses of his stage-play style.

Confident of their "specialness," Orton and Halliwell refused to work for long periods.

They subsisted on Halliwell's money (and unemployment benefits) and were forced to follow an ascetic life to restrict their spending to £5 a week.

From January 1959, Orton and Halliwell began surreptitiously to remove books from several local public libraries and modify the cover art or the blurbs before returning them.

A volume of poems by Sir John Betjeman was returned to the library with a new dust jacket featuring a photograph of a nearly naked, heavily tattooed middle-aged man.

The couple decorated their flat with many of the prints.

They were discovered and prosecuted.

On 30 April 1962 they pleaded guilty to two joint charges of theft, the first relating to 36 books taken from Islington Public Library in Essex Road, and the second to 36 books taken from a branch of the same library in Holloway Road.

At a further hearing in May 1962 they pleaded guilty to further joint charges of theft and criminal damage, and were sentenced to prison for six months, with fines of £2 each.

The incident was reported in the Daily Mirror as "Gorilla in the Roses", illustrated with the altered Collins Guide to Roses by Bertram Park.

Orton and Halliwell felt that the sentence was unduly harsh "because we were queers".

Prison was a crucial formative experience; the isolation from Halliwell allowed Orton to break free of him creatively; and he saw what he considered the corruption, priggishness, and double standards of a purportedly liberal country.

As Orton put it: "It affected my attitude towards society. Before I had been vaguely conscious of something rotten somewhere, prison crystallised this. The old whore society really lifted up her skirts and the stench was pretty foul.... Being in the nick brought detachment to my writing. I wasn't involved any more. And suddenly it worked."

His public career, from 1964 until his murder in 1967, was short but highly influential.

During this brief period he shocked, outraged, and amused audiences with his scandalous black comedies.

The adjective Ortonesque refers to work characterised by a similarly dark yet farcical cynicism.