Orton: The Dentures in the Dummy

One week after his mother’s funeral, Joe Orton brought a surprise to Kenneth Cranham, the actor who played Hal in the acclaimed 1966 West End production of Loot. Feigning a routine inspection of the rehearsal, Orton nonchalantly handed Cranham a pair of false teeth–a prop Hal takes from his mother’s corpse and clicks like castanets. Dancing his own irreverent flamenco, Orton demonstrated that life imitates art. The dentures belonged to his dead mother. Even Cranham, whose working-class defiance rivaled Orton’s own truculence, jumped at the chattering remains of the late Mrs. Orton. In his diaries, the playwright recorded the dental delivery and Cranham’s nausea: “‘Here, I thought you’d like the originals.’ [Cranham] said, ‘What?’ ‘Teeth,’ I said. ‘Whose?’ he said. ‘My mum’s,’ I said. He looked very sick” (Diaries, 47). The gag typifies Orton’s jokes–an impertinent mélange of absurd farce and reality.

The verisimilitude of the stage corpse had already been a touchy subject. The Lord Chamberlain, British guardian against public offense until the passage of the 1968 anti-censorship act, targeted the body in his 1964 bowdlerization of the script, mandating that a dummy, not a real actor, play the role of the deceased Mrs. McLeavy. Handing his own mother’s set of fake-teeth to Cranham, Orton slipped a fresh obscenity past the prudish censors. The brazen gesture sums up Orton’s attitude towards authority: find an insolent way to subvert it. The Lord Chamberlain had also objected to the corpse’s tumbling out of the wardrobe. Orton obliged defiantly. In the final version of the script, the corpse stood still in the wardrobe, but it stood on its head.

An upside-down corpse stuffed with Orton’s dead mother’s teeth captures the playwright’s sense of anarchy. With Loot, Orton turned middle-class platitudes on their heads. As Robert Brustein points out in The Theatre of Revolt, attacking the bourgeoisie drove many modern playwrights. The method of Orton’s assault, however, was revolutionary. Orton anchored black comedy in banal realism. “Ortonesque,” a term that came into vogue after the success of Loot, describes a combination of the absurd and the familiar. The false teeth, in all his plays, are real. This paradox gives his farce a bite. “There’s supposed to be a healthy shock,” Orton said, “at those moments in Loot when an audience suddenly stops laughing. So if Loot is played as no more than farcical, it won’t work” (Ears, 226).

Loot takes place behind a looking glass that turns values, institutions, and beliefs inside out. The tricksters win, and the only law-abiding citizen in the play, Mr. McLeavy, goes to prison. Characters contradict assumptions about their roles: Fay, the nurse, has a track record of killing, rather than healing, husbands; Inspector Truscott of the Yard beats up London’s citizens; Hal, a good Catholic son who can’t tell a lie and refuses to look at his mother’s naked corpse, is a homosexual crook; Dennis, Hal’s partner in crime and bed, is engaged to Fay; even dead Mrs. McLeavy, revered by the community bingo circle and buried in her Women’s Voluntary Service uniform, led a double-life. Placing an embroidered text on Mrs. McLeavy’s coffin, Fay delivers one of Orton’s famous quips: “Here–the Ten Commandments. She was a great believer in some of them.”

Although Orton’s writing contains many epigrams–a quality the playwright attributed to an appreciation for Oscar Wilde and the Restoration playwrights William Wycherley and William Congreve–it also reflects the phrases and rhythms of everyday British speech. “Oscar Wilde’s style is much more earthy and colloquial than most people notice,” Orton said in an interview. “When we look at Lady Bracknell, she’s the most ordinary, common, direct woman; she’s not an affected woman at all. People are taken in by ‘the glittering style.’ It’s not glitter. Congreve is the same. It’s real–a slice of life. It’s just very brilliantly written, perfectly believable. Nothing at all incredible” (Ears, 127). Orton often reminded proper London society that he had grown up “in the gutter”–an upbringing that gave him a taste for impropriety and helped him script everyday dialogue. The critic Maurice Charney termed Orton’s writing “quotidian farce”–a style that combines artificial, epigrammatic comedy with the language and attitudes of daily life.

It took an entire year of confused acting, misdirection, and frustrated rewriting before Loot found its idiosyncratic voice. Striking a balance between outrageous farce and the quotidian was a difficult task for everyone in the premiere 1965 production. Orton wanted all his lines, including the heightened epigrams, executed in a style that would not remove the play from reality. He insisted that actors abandon the stylized traditions of farce, replacing exaggeration with realism. But the actors were highly presentational, delivering many of their lines directly to the audience. After making a lethargic tour around London’s suburbs, the production failed and nearly destroyed Orton’s reputation.

That trying experience, however, helped Orton articulate his new style. In production notes for the 1966 Royal Court production of Ruffian on the Stair, the playwright banned any stylization: “The play is clearly not written naturalistically, but it must be directed and acted with absolute realism. No ‘stylization,’ no ‘camp.’ No attempt in fact to match the author’s extravagance of dialogue with extravagance of direction. REALISTIC PLAYING AND DIRECTING. Every one of the characters must be real. None of them is ever consciously funny” (Ears, 157). He issued a similar warning when Broadway began to prepare a production of Loot: “Unless Loot is directed and acted perfectly seriously, the play will fail. As it failed in its original touring version . . . I don’t want anything queer or camp or odd about the relationship between Hal and Dennis . . . I won’t have the Great American queen brought into it” (Ears 227 and 248).

For Orton, everyday reality was an absurd show. “Most people think it’s a fantasy,” he said when receiving the Evening Standard Best Play of 1966 Award for Loot, “but Scotland Yard know it’s true” (Ears 261). He had, in fact, modeled Truscott of the Yard after Detective Sergeant Harold Challenor, a real-life London policeman whose obsession with catching criminals led him to plant incriminating evidence on innocent victims (Ears 236). Orton, who with his partner Kenneth Halliwell had been imprisoned for six months in 1962 for defacing library books and who had spent many years maneuvering around police raids on homosexual hangouts, defied traditional British deference to the constabulary. Loot ridicules trust in authority; in the play, naïve characters like McLeavy, entangled in a web of cultural myths, fall prey to police brutality. The play’s epigraph, taken from Shaw’s Misalliance, is dead serious: “Anarchism is a game at which the Police can beat you . . . [and] the British public tends not to believe it.”

Orton parodied the charades of everyday life in Britain. In the first act of Loot, Truscott of the Yard works undercover as an inspector from the metropolitan water board. But the Inspector’s disguise is paper-thin. Without changing a bit, Truscott reveals his obvious identity in the second act: “I conduct my cases under an assumed voice and I am a master of disguise. (He takes off his hat.) You see–a complete transformation.” Experienced in the way of the world, Orton saw through the disguises around him. He laughed at what sociologist Irving Goffman soberly outlined in his contemporaneous study, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life: that individuals perform their identities. Goffman studied the ways in which individuals and groups (he takes the example of a waitstaff in a restaurant) control, manage, and maintain their performances in order to prevent disruptions–mistakes or slips out of character in front of the audience. Orton got a kick out of those disruptions and slips of behavior management because they revealed life as a game of show. In the final line of the play, Fay advises her cohorts in crime, “We must keep up appearances.” Having risen from the working-class to London’s exclusive theatrical circles, Orton understood life as riotous role-playing.

Orton grew up in an abusive, working-class family in the industrial city of Leicester. An aspiring asthmatic actor who couldn’t hold down a job, Orton was determined to escape from the confines of Leicester. Hindered by his strong regional accent, he enrolled in elocution lessons with Madame Rothery. In 1951, he matriculated as an acting student at The Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, where he met his lifetime partner and eventual murderer, Kenneth Halliwell. After the BBC airing of Ruffian on the Stair in 1963, Peggy Ramsey, one of London’s sassiest and shrewdest agents, took on Orton. To avoid confusion with playwright John Osborne, Ramsey suggested a change of names. John became Joe. Within three years, Joe became London’s most promising playwright.

At Peggy Ramsey’s suggestion, Orton began writing diaries in 1966. He kept the journals for the last eight months of his life–from receiving the Best Play of 1966 Award for Loot until his bludgeoning death by Halliwell. Many parts of the diaries read like a play. A number of entries are transcriptions of conversations Orton overheard; and many passages echo Orton’s dramatic style, grounding his clandestine sexual escapades in minute, realistic details. The journals dramatize Orton’s life. And, like any play, the diaries needed an audience. “I’m keeping a diary,” Orton wrote to Peggy Ramsey from Tangier on May 26, 1967, “to be published long after my death” (Diaries, 13). But the diaries, edited and published by Orton’s biographer John Lahr in 1986, were actually read before Orton’s death. Orton constantly encouraged his increasingly insipid partner, Halliwell, to read them. Left alone in their small one-bedroom apartment while Orton accepted awards at banquets and wandered through London’s anonymous homosexual underworld, Halliwell became the most infamous of Orton’s many outraged audience members. On August 8, 1967, Halliwell crushed Orton’s skull with nine frenzied, fatal hammer blows. He then took his own life by overdosing on anti-depressants. When police broke down their door the next morning, they found Orton’s journals on a desk between the two blood-splattered bodies. Atop the diaries, Halliwell had left a note: “If you read his diary all will be explained. K.H. P.S. Especially the latter part.”

Orton might have scripted such a grotesque death for one of his plays. This final scene shocked audiences into silence. The laughter stopped. Life, for Orton, turned out as gruesome and absurd as his plays. In Loot, Orton had made an uncanny prediction of his mother’s funeral. In his diaries, he recorded a conversation with TV producer Peter Willes: “I told him about [my mother’s] funeral. And the frenzied way my family behave. He seemed shocked. But then he thinks my plays are fantasies. He suddenly caught a glimpse of the fact that I write the truth” (Diaries, 46). The absurdity of everyday life and the sense of the self as performance have obsessed many twentieth-century playwrights. The idea that life is a series of roles drove Pirandello into existential anguish. Genet, in contrast, derived erotic joy from the game of appearances. Orton laughed at it. And he laughed even harder at others for being blind to the obvious.

Sources:
Lahr, John. Prick Up Your Ears. London: Penguin, 1978.
Lahr, John ed. The Orton Diaries. London: Menthuen, 1986.

Ryan McKittrick is a second-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theater Training.