Volume 26, Number 15 · October 11, 1979
Nothing to Lose
By David Trainer
Prick Up Your Ears: The Biography of Joe Orton
by John Lahr
Knopf, 302 pp., $15.00
'Complete extinction has done nothing to silence her slanderous tongue,' says Mr. McLeavy in Joe Orton's play Loot (1964), when he is told that a vision of his deceased wife has accused him of murdering her. The same might be said of the author—himself hideously murdered in 1967 at the age of thirty-four by his longtime homosexual friend and roommate Kenneth Halliwell. Orton wrote three long plays (and a number of shorter pieces) which still speak in his distinctive comic voice. He is best when he attacks the morality, sense of propriety, and respect for authority of the British working class from which he himself came. In an early one-act play, The Ruffian on the Stair (1963), a murderer is charged, 'This is what comes of having no regular job.' In another one-act play, The Good and Faithful Servant (1964), Ray admits to his grandparents that he has no job at all:
Review, 3266 words
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