{"id":363,"date":"2016-05-13T08:42:17","date_gmt":"2016-05-13T08:42:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/english\/?p=363"},"modified":"2025-02-26T13:19:41","modified_gmt":"2025-02-26T13:19:41","slug":"looting-the-archives-joe-orton","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/english\/2016\/05\/13\/looting-the-archives-joe-orton\/","title":{"rendered":"Looting the Archives: Joe Orton"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dr. Samantha Mitschke has been working in the School of Arts as an AHRC Cultural Engagement Fellow since February. Working with the archives held in Special Collections at the University of Leicester, she has curated a public exhibition taking place in September 2016 as part of the fiftieth anniversary celebrations of the London premiere of Loot<\/em>, written by Leicester-born playwright Joe Orton. <\/strong><\/p>\n

In this blog, she discusses her response to a scrapbook of press reviews of Loot<\/em> that Orton kept in his lifetime \u2013 and how it reveals a different side to his public persona.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>One of the most striking things about playwright Joe Orton is his apparently endless confidence. Born to working-class parents in Leicester in 1933, Orton left the Saffron Lane estate aged 17 to become an actor, decided to become a writer, and eventually exploded on to the London theatre scene in 1964 with his quirky and sexually-charged Entertaining Mr. Sloane<\/em>, in which a brother and sister fight for the attentions of their bisexual lodger.<\/p>\n

Looking through the Orton archives held at Leicester \u2013 as I have been hugely enjoying doing so over the past couple of months \u2013 swathes of items, from letters and newspaper interviews to photographs, paint a picture of a young and talented playwright facing the world with self-assured confidence. But glimpses of vulnerability and self-doubt can be seen, especially from the time when the first production of Loot<\/em> flopped on provincial tour, including a defensive letter from Orton to his agent, Peggy Ramsay, and a wearily sorrowful letter to his partner Kenneth Halliwell, describing the play\u2019s failure and asking plaintively: \u201cCan\u2019t you call me?\u201d<\/p>\n

Orton was known for his careless confidence but his private papers reveal a different side \u2013and none more so than the scrapbook of press cuttings he kept for Loot<\/em>. The first production of Loot<\/em> took place in 1965 with a star-studded cast including Kenneth Williams and Geraldine McEwan. The success of Entertaining Mr. Sloane<\/em> the year before had given the critics \u2013 and possibly Joe himself \u2013 high expectations that Loot<\/em> would be rapturously received.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis play makes a night to forget\u201d, \u201cFarce \u2013 but it’s so sick\u201d and \u201cToo many flat lines in this macabre farce\u201d were just some of the headlines. The critics ranted against the language, the plot, the structure, the jokes, and even the actors\u2019 performances. Yet Joe faithfully \u2013 and, it can be imagined, stoically \u2013 cut out every single review and pasted them into a blue-covered scrapbook, the word \u201cLoot\u201d on the front made from magazine letters. It\u2019s possible that he did so as he found the outrage in them amusing \u2013 \u2018outraging\u2019 the public was his raison d’\u00eatre, as evidenced by a sardonic diary entry in which he noted: \u201cMuch more fucking and they\u2019ll be screaming hysterics in no time.\u201d However, as a fellow writer I can only conjecture how painful those reviews must have been for him, especially after the success of Sloane<\/em>. The scrapbook contains pages and pages of such reviews, yellowed with age, often accompanied by a scrawl in his handwriting where he noted the dates and names of newspapers.<\/p>\n

Wh\"One<\/a>y did he keep such a detailed record of the play\u2019s failure? In the previously-mentioned letter to Peggy Ramsay, Orton declared that he had never been stimulated by failure and threatened to stop writing altogether. But I believe that, no matter how cuttingly or pitilessly he judged other people \u2013 his diary is full of snarky references to acquaintances \u2013 Orton was also brutally honest with himself. Perhaps he felt that by ignoring or minimising the play\u2019s negative reputation, he would be deceiving himself in a manner that he deliberately \u2018sent up\u2019 with the characters in his plays, many of whom have outward pretensions but refuse to acknowledge the truth of their lives. That Orton knew well enough the devastating truth of his own life is demonstrated by a small cartoon that he stuck into the scrapbook of a bear with a lump on its brow and the caption \u201cDo you feel like a bear with a sore head?\u201d \u2013 also suggesting an element of anger, and that he only felt able to express his anger through humour.<\/p>\n

In 1966 Loot<\/em> was staged again, with a new cast and director, and following extensive rewrites. It was a hit. Some critics still hated it, but many now saw the play for what it was \u2013 a satirical attack on society\u2019s steadfast hypocrisy, stickling over outward morality and conventions, and blind faith in corrupt authority. The latter half of the scrapbook\u2019s full pages are filled with critical positivity, praising all of the elements that had previously been reviled. It is easy to picture Joe smiling \u2013 with some justifiable relief \u2013 as he pasted these new reviews in for posterity. The reversal of Loot<\/em>\u2019s fortunes included the 1966 Evening<\/em> Standard<\/em> Award for Best Play, and Joe \u2013 with his carefully-adopted swagger, easy charm and gift for language \u2013 must have seemed to all the world that everything was going his way.<\/p>\n

There is one final entry into the scrapbook, however, that hints at the vulnerability just beneath the confident surface. On the very last page, a small caption is pasted:<\/p>\n

\"Quote<\/a><\/p>\n

No matter what the rest of the world saw, it seems that Joe was not necessarily always as confident as he appeared \u2013 and always tried to stay true to himself.<\/p>\n

The Loot<\/em> scrapbook and other personal items belonging to Joe Orton \u2013 including the original Evening Standard<\/em> award \u2013 will be on display at New Walk Museum and Art Gallery in Leicester from September 2016. <\/strong><\/p>\n

A special one-day event, \u201cJoe Orton\u2019s Loot: A 50th<\/sup> Anniversary Celebration\u201d, is taking place at New Walk on Sunday 25 September 2016. Tickets are free but booking is essential. Email Dr Emma Parker, School of Arts for details: <\/strong>ep27@le.ac.uk<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Website: <\/strong>http:\/\/www2.le.ac.uk\/departments\/english\/research\/joe-orton-50-years-on<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Twitter: @JoeOrtonWriter<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dr. Samantha Mitschke has been working in the School of Arts as an AHRC Cultural Engagement Fellow since February. Working with the archives held in Special Collections at the University of Leicester, she has curated a public exhibition taking place in September 2016 as part of the fiftieth anniversary celebrations of the London premiere of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":253,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60,26,61],"tags":[63,62,64,67,66,65],"class_list":["post-363","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archives","category-creative-writing","category-drama","tag-archives","tag-joe-orton","tag-loot","tag-reviews","tag-scrapbook","tag-special-collections"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/253"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=363"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":370,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363\/revisions\/370"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}