Joe Orton exhibition runs until 31 August 2014

Our current exhibition in the Library, ‘Joe Orton in 1964’, which runs until 31 August 2014, commemorates the 50th anniversary of Orton’s first major success, Entertaining Mr Sloane.  The Joe Orton Archive was purchased by the University in 1997 and can be viewed by appointment in the Special Collections reading room.

The beginning of ‘Entertaining Mr Sloane’ from a script for the 1964 production at the New Theatre, St Martin’s Lane

When I was working on the exhibition, I couldn’t help but be struck by the evidence of the archive as to how seriously Orton approached the craft of writing and how very, very hard he worked at it.  Because of the deliberately provocative and scandalous nature of his work, and because of his unconventional lifestyle (an openly gay man in the 1960s, he was murdered in August 1967 in an horrifically bloody fashion by his long-term lover, Kenneth Halliwell, who then killed himself), even now Orton is sometimes remembered more for the scandal and publicity that surrounded his short career as a playwright, rather than for the quality of his writing.  I hope the 50th anniversary events will help to change that.
I had a wonderful time working on the exhibition – I couldn’t believe my luck in being paid to do it!  For me, it’s the small and on-the-face-of-it inconsequential finds in the archive that bring it to life, that can take you back in time.  One example – Orton’s diary for the Thursday before Christmas 1966, describes a shopping expedition to Bloomsbury to buy a china pig, just like the one he and Halliwell already own, as a present for a friend.  Looking at one of the photographs featured in the exhibition, Orton in his famously tidy Islington flat in front of the collage made from stolen library books, I happened to notice that very china pig on the shelf.  Snaps by family and friends are often so much more interesting than the posed photograph portraits – the exhibition includes some examples of Orton on a ferry boat and outside the Lyceum Theatre in New York in 1965.

Orton outside the Lyceum Theatre in New York, where ‘Sloane’ opened in October 1965

‘I … like leading an ordinary life,’ Orton said in a radio interview with the BBC in 1964.  ‘I don’t … like going out to parties, not that anybody has invited me to parties or anything like that, I’m not all that famous, but I do like leading an ordinary life, as just an ordinary person.  I think … I’ve got this ability to write this kind of dialogue because of the life I’ve led in the past and I think that if you uprooted me and planted me in a different setting, a much more sort of worldly setting, that I wouldn’t be able to write as I do.’  Quite clearly, Orton was anything but an ordinary person – and yet he did like to keep under the radar, to observe others unnoticed.  After the success of Sloane, he began to mix in artistic and literary circles.  He could make himself seem at home in any setting and charm anyone he chose to, but he didn’t leave the working-class boy from Leicester behind.  ‘I look better in cheap clothes,’ he told the producer of Loot.  ‘I’m from the gutter.  And don’t you ever forget it, because I won’t.’
The exhibition, using correspondence, scripts, press cuttings and photographs from the Archive, is in the Special Collections display case in the basement of the David Wilson Library.  Entry to the library is free but controlled, so if you are not a student or member of University staff, please ask to be let through the barrier.  Details of staffed opening hours are available on the library website.