Word: orton
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...ORTON was an outrageous homosexual playwright from lowerclass Leicester who lived for 15 years in a one-room flat with his one-time mentor, sometime lover and eventual murderer, Kenneth Halliwell. Precocious as a youth growing up in the 1950s, by the mid-1960s Orton was a rising star in British theater. His daring and almost obscene plays challenged stodgy British society and caught the imagination of forward thinking Englishmen--he even was commissioned to write a screenplay for the Beatles. Revelling in his homosexuality, Orton pursued an endless number of anonymous sexual encounters in public bathrooms, abandoned houses, subway...
...same time, Halliwell, seven years Orton's elder and a would-be writer or artist himself, saw his companion's fortune grow while he languished in obscurity. Even sexually Halliwell was made to feel inferior; Orton's behavior loudly proclaimed his preference for toiletstall encounters over Halliwell's charms. So on August 9, 1967 Halliwell, aged 41, beat Orton, aged 34, to death with a hammer. He then swallowed 22 Nembutals and died...
...bizarre circumstances of Orton's life hardly make for an empathetic telling, but in Prick Up Your Ears, screenwriter Alan Bennett and director Stephen Frears have fashioned a compelling, naturalistic and extremely entertaining picture. What could have easily been a sexo-literary freak show instead ripples with wit and energy...
Gary Oldman looks spookily like Joe, with that puckish smile that told the world, "You want me to get away with it." Vanessa Redgrave has, and deserves, many of the best lines as Orton's sardonic agent. Bennett's script is a mine of epigrams and a model of construction (except for a framing device that portrays Lahr as an Orton manque and his wife as a pathetic Ken doll). But the workmanlike style of Director Stephen Frears (My Beautiful Laundrette) emphasizes the drab and the obvious. Frears cannot match the script's sleek malice, so he gets his laughs...
Prick Up Your Ears is a view from outside, cool as Orton's craft. But Ken Russell has always been caged inside the beautiful mad creatures he imagines artists to be. No distance, no irony, no coherence, no prisoners. And no surprise that Russell now turns to Gothic, Stephen Volk's script about the famous night in 1816 that Byron (Gabriel Byrne) spent with his mistress Claire Clairmont (Myriam Cyr), his lover John William Polidori (Timothy Spall), his friend Percy Bysshe Shelley (Julian Sands) and Shelley's wife-to-be Mary Godwin (Natasha Richardson). From that spectral evening emerged Mary...