Word: orton
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Orton...
...With madness, as with vomit, it's the passer-by who receives the inconvenience," says a character in Joe Orton's one-act satire The Erpingham Camp. No doubt about it, playwright Joe Orton was a great, corrosive farcist. With such devilish lines, he's been pricking up everyone's ears for the past two decades, and it's been audiences who've felt the inconvenience of his caustic, mad wit. He was so talented, even the cheeky, musical imps of the perverse, The Beatles, had Orton working on an original screenplay when he was bludgeoned to death...
While the British movie, Prick Up Your Ears, has done much to introduce Orton to the U.S., it's only been in the last two years that his plays have been produced in America. There was a successful run of Loot off-Broadway this past year, and his acclaimed masterpiece, What the Butler Saw, has enjoyed stage-time in Harvard's own Loeb Ex and in New Hampshire. Now Bostonians can delight in a short one-act Orton gem, The Erpingham Camp, done with great energy and skill by Harvard/Radcliffe Summer Theatre...
...Erpingham Camp is a biting comic-book political satire where the characters have no character, and are hardly more than grotesques. Orton populates his play with social types who cover the entire political spectrum. What makes Orton's satire so savage is that his grotesques manage to seem "real." That "real" people can be the way Orton portrays them is both disturbing and awfully hard to accept...
...twisted activity and its horrible and inevitable conclusion, Prick Up Your Ears is a surprisingly life-affirming film. The terrible deaths Orton and Halliwell meet do not hang over the story, and unlike other arty pictures with similar endings--Betty Blue comes to mind--life is not treated as an unnatural interregnum until death. Prick Up Your Ears joyously proclaims Orton's unbridled exuberance, not his untimely and truly tragic demise...