The Orton Diaries

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Kemp is all groin and grins in the hilarious first act before showing how the playwright’s ravenous eye becomes simply cruel – his flashes of misogyny and racism, his poisonous self-regard. Can anybody be safe from today’s cancel culture and the modern statue-smashing, history-erasing thought police? Now, with Orton's best-known work revived in the West End, comes this startling confession from theatre and film critic Michael Thornton. Before his career had barely begun, however, he was murdered by his homosexual lover, apparently in a fit of jealousy over his success.

The Story of Joe · LRB 4 December 1986 Craig Raine · The Story of Joe · LRB 4 December 1986

The power wielded at the start is all Sloane's but, by the end, the balance has shifted to the siblings. He would have crashed and burned with his own nihilistic hedonism at some point (perhaps when his career was turning down?His last plays, in which violent animal spirits subvert dialogue of extreme, even Victorian, formality and outrageous authority figures, represent probably the greatest comic achievement of contemporary British drama. A more relevant landmark in the playwright's life might be the jail term he served for the bizarre crime of defacing library books, replacing illustrations with uproarious collages, and rewriting jacket blurbs in "mildly obscene" parodies of journalistic cliche. Distance helps: with Aids dominating gay life in the 1980s, and Clause 28 on the horizon, Orton’s priapic endeavours made him seem then like a purely heroic sexual swashbuckler.

BBC Radio 4 Extra - Joe Orton - The Orton Diaries

Habrá que leerse sus comedias, porque en sus diarios, del wildean wit que lo hiciera tan célebre, ni rastro. The diaries chronicle frankly and hilariously the literary successes (capped with an Evening Standard Award and overtures from the Beatles), the rejection of all conventions, and the astonishing sexual adventures (at his mother's funeral.A twenty-year silence indicates incest rather than homosexuality and, increasingly, the friend looks more and more like a ‘friend’, a fiction to deflect blame. Joe was a brilliant, creative, cutting-edge playwright who was just coming into his own when he was killed violently by his long-time partner. His untimely and maybe ultimately unavoidable death, aged just 34, at the hands of his long term lover, Ken Halliwell, was unbelievably sad. 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.

Joe Orton is scrapped amid a row over his sex As a statue of Joe Orton is scrapped amid a row over his sex

Priscilla Presley breaks down in tears as she says late daughter Lisa Marie was 'suicidal' months before her. Orton agreed, but the effect on Halliwell of this exclusion proved so traumatic that even Peter Willes, who loathed him, telephoned Joe in alarm and urged: ' Listen, you can't leave Kenneth and come to the party. Todos quedan reflejados en estos “Diarios” (deliciosamente publicados por Cabaret Voltaire, como es habitual en esta editorial). AXE TRAGEDY Man whose hand was cut off in attack that featured on The Detectives dies What is Joe Orton Laid Bare? HM would be so amused by Joe,' she told me, 'but I really cannot have that other dreadful man present on such an occasion.It captures London theater culture as well as pop culture of that period and time - meaning the 60's.