The two men whom I here portray were infants terribles of the 1950s and 1960s. Both were playwrights, talented
characters with decidedly dark sides. Osborne was the original Angry Young Man who
became a versatile libertarian then moved on to fulminate as a highly
articulate critic broadly from the Right. Orton’s career was shorter and even
more subversive, his work noted for anarchic and surrealistic comedy. He
succumbed prematurely as the victim of a spectacularly brutal murder by his
unhinged boyfriend.
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| Young John Osborne |
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| Joe Orton looking cheeky |
John Osborne
(1929-94), was brought up in Stoneleigh, Surrey the son of a modest commercial
artist from Wales and a Cockney barmaid called Nellie, whom Osborne despised
for her ignorance and selfishness. His father, whom Osborne idolised, died when
John was 12 and the windfall proceeds of a life insurance policy allowed John
to go to a minor public school in Dorset from 1943 to 1945. He was expelled for
striking the headmaster after being disciplined, drifted into trade journalism
and ended up in a third rate theatrical repertory company, operating in
provincial venues, run by one Anthony Creighton. Osborne liked to act and
supposedly once played Hamlet in a
hall in Hayling Island: in his pomp he appeared in cameo roles in various films
but he had no great talent. He also married for the first time (he had 5 wives)
Pamela Lane, a rather more successful Thespian than he.
John turned his hand to writing plays and co-authored two
with Anthony Creighton, one of which An
Epitaph for George Dillon later had a small success. In 1955 while lounging
on a deck chair in Ilfracombe he wrote Look
Back in Anger, depicting the impoverished married life of the hero Jimmy
Porter, raging against English society, his own frustrations and life in
general. It was a world away from the polite theatre of the time (Osborne
paradoxically was an admirer of Terence Rattigan) and the play’s manuscript was
rejected by every leading agency. However The English Stage Company based at
the Royal Court Theatre was desperate for some new material during an
unsuccessful repertory season. Its leader George Devine rowed out to
Creighton’s houseboat on the Thames where Osborne was staying and took the
play.
Its opening night in 1956, with Kenneth Haigh as Jimmy and
Mary Ure as his wife, saw mixed reactions; ”A self-pitying snivel” thought the Evening Standard but Kenneth Tynan in
the Observer and Harold Hobson in the
Sunday Times were full of praise and
it gained momentum and soon became a huge commercial success – a film with
Richard Burton and Mary Ure came in 1958. Osborne became rich and he married
Mary Ure after a two-year affair.
Arthur Miller, married to Marilyn Monroe who was making the
Rattigan-scripted film The Prince and the
Showgirl in London with Laurence
Olivier, took Olivier to see Look back in
Anger. Miller was impressed but Olivier disliked it. However they met
Osborne and Olivier somehow agreed to be cast in Osborne’s next play – The Entertainer. He had a great success
as Archie Rice, the end-of-the-pier comedian satirising Britain’s lost role in
the world, and revived his faltering career.
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| Osborne, Mary Ure, Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier |
Osborne’s next effort was a musical lampooning the tabloid
press The World of Paul Slickey and
it proved to be one of the most dismal floperoos in theatrical history, closing
after 3 nights, with Osborne pursued by a mob of irate theatre-goers. His 1960
play Luther saw him back on form, praising
the congenital dissident and his later Inadmissable
Evidence, with Nicol Williamson as the infuriated lawyer, took time to
become the classic it is now regarded. Osborne reached his dramatic peak with A Patriot for Me (1967) exploring sexual
ambiguity in the Habsburg Empire.
Osborne published in left-wing Tribune his excoriating essay
Damn you. England in 1961 but John was not a convincing Leftie. He wrote
the letter from his lavish villa in Provence while his new mistress film critic
Penelope Gilliatt prepared to marry him and his wife Mary Ure was having a
child in London fathered by her new paramour Robert Shaw. He became richer with
his sparkling screenplay for the highly-rated film Tom Jones (1963).
He wrote more plays but his best were already done. He
drifted away from the theatre and rather enjoyed playing the squire in his
Shropshire retreat. He amused the public with his autobiography A Better Class of Person (1981) and Almost a Gentleman (1991), but his cruel
portrayal of his mother and jeering at his 3rd and 4th wives,
Penelope Gilliatt, later an alcoholic and the actress Jill Bennett, who
committed suicide (as did Mary Ure long after their divorce) were tastelessly
deplorable.
Here is Osborne’s bile on the death of Jill Bennett:
Adolf [Osborne's nickname for her] has left
half a million to Battersea
Dogs' Home. She never bought a bar of soap in all the
time she lived with me. Always, she cried poverty… It is the most perfect act
of misanthropy, judged with the tawdry, kindless theatricality she strove to
achieve in life. She had no love in her heart for people and only a little more
for dogs. Her brand of malignity, unlike Penelope's went beyond even the banality of ambition….
Her frigidity was almost total. She loathed men and pretended to love women,
whom she hated even more. She was at ease only in the company of homosexuals,
who she also despised but whose narcissism matched her own. I never heard her
say an admiring thing of anyone… Everything about her life had been a
pernicious confection, a sham.
Osborne finally settled down in 1978 with his 5th
wife, journalist Helen Dawson, but diabetes assailed him and he died of
complications in 1994. He was 65 and he had revolutionised English theatre.
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| Osborne the Shropshire squire, helping restore the church roof |
Joe Orton
(1933-67) was born to a municipal gardener father and a shoe factory worker
mother and was brought up in a council estate in proletarian Leicester. He
failed his 11+, completed a secretarial college course and worked as a junior
clerk. Keen on acting, he joined amateur dramatic societies and eventually he
was accepted by drama college RADA in London which he entered in 1951. He met
Kenneth Halliwell there and they became lovers, moving together into a flat in
West Hampstead. Neither Orton nor Halliwell had much academic nor professional
success at RADA and both took fitful jobs in provincial repertory companies.
Halliwell was 7 years older than Orton and they were able to live a Spartan
life on a small legacy.
In 1959 they moved to an austere flat in Noel Street,
Islington and tried without success to have novels on which they collaborated
published. To amuse themselves, they took to defacing library books with
bizarre collages and obscene drawings – Halliwell had covered their bedroom
walls with his efforts. In 1962 they were tracked down and prosecuted, both
being sent, rather harshly surely, to 6 months imprisonment from which they
were released in September 1962. Prison
was a liberation for Orton as it freed him from the stifling influence of
Halliwell and he was thereafter able to write in his own way; Halliwell was
crushed by the experience and his mental health began to deteriorate.
After 10 years of hardship Orton finally found his métier
with Entertaining Mr Sloane, a black comedy about a landlady and her
brother enticing a psychopathic young man into sexual liaisons. It had a
successful 3-week opening run then, with financial help from the deeply
unfashionable Terence Rattigan who much admired Orton’s stagecraft, it was
transferred to the West End and commercial success.
Orton followed this in 1964 with ill-prepared Loot, a parody of detective fiction,
which was received badly and had to be withdrawn. Discouraged, Orton and
Halliwell went on an R&R gay holiday in Tangiers with their timid friend comedian
Kenneth Williams and savoured the erotic embraces of mercenary Arab youths and
the heady joys of cannabis. Refreshed, Orton worked hard on re-writing Loot and in 1966 it was successfully
staged at the Criterion Theatre in Piccadilly Circus, enlivened by using the dentures
of Orton’s newly dead mother as castanets, a typically Ortonesque touch.
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| Joe Orton, Kenneth Williams and Kenneth Halliwell in Tangiers |
All this time Orton was getting rich and famous leaving his
partner Halliwell depressed and jealous. Orton lived a life of total gay
promiscuity and he recorded his encounters in a droll dead-pan fashion in
graphic and scabrous detail in his Diaries,
posthumously published.
Returning to their flat in August 1967 Orton was set upon by
Halliwell who beat out his brains with 9 hammer-blows. He fled the
blood-spattered scene and died after taking an overdose of Nembutal. Orton’s
final play What the Butler Saw was
produced in 1969, starring Ralph Richardson, Coral Browne and Stanley Baxter
and his splendidly titled biography Prick
up your Ears by American John Lahr appeared in 1978.
Joe Orton was a talented and vivid character of the
licentious 1960s.
SMD
3.10.16
Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2016
