Word: orton
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Orton and Kenneth Halliwell were the very best of friends. They met at a London drama school, and for ten years they lived together, visited friends together, took their vacations together. In 1962, they were even arrested together-for putting obscene pictures in library books. They shared everything they had, and they made out their wills to each other. Then they died together, and a coroner's jury last week determined why: their friendship had ended...
...problem was Orton's sudden success as a playwright. His first effort, Entertaining Mr. Shane, was a homosexual, black comedy (boy meets girl, boy bludgeons girl's father, boy runs off with girl's brother) which London critics voted the best play of 1964. Orton's next plays, Loot and Crimes of Passion, were just as black and just about as successful. Instead of spending his days with Halliwell, Orton became caught up in a social whirl of producers, directors and stars. Halliwell was shattered. He tried to become a painter, but got nowhere. He chain...
Last week when Joe Orton, a brilliant British playwright of 34, was killed, "A Day in the Life" was played at his funeral. "I read the news today, o boy/about a lucky guy who made the grade." It was the perfect comment on a fellow comic artist, and nothing could better have proven the Beatles' uncanny relevance to just about any occasion...
...Tolstoy once wrote, "All happy families resemble each other; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Not so, says Joe Orton's Entertaining Mr. Sloane, a British play about a family which at curtain's fall is happy, or at least content, in its own very peculiar way. The plot, as summed up in the play's advertising, is this: "Sister wants to sleep with Mr. Sloane; Brother wants to sleep with Mr. Sloane; Mr. Sloane kicks Dada to death." Hardly the kind of situation which makes for happiness, in the natural order of things. But black comedy...
...black, and occasionally blue, content, Entertaining Mr. Sloane is an absorbing comedy. Joe Orton spoon feeds his audience shock and grotesquerie, he doesn't throw it in their face. He uses an acute comic talent to show how people lose themselves in petty, selfish, and deviate concerns. The playwright has taken the time he is serving at a leading London prison to construct a careful play which grows progressively grotesque as the characters perceive and accommodate each other's desires...