Author: Joe OrtonPublisher:
ISBN: 9780413777249
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 328
Book Description
The Orton Diaries
Author: Joe OrtonPublisher: Methuen Publishing
ISBN: 9780413736505
Category : Dramatists, English
Languages : en
Pages : 304
Book Description
Fron December 1966 to his murder in August 1967, Joe Orton kept a series of diaries that prove to be one of the most candid and unfettered accounts of that remarkable era. They chronicle his life from his literary success to his sexual escapades.
The Orton Diaries
Author: Joe OrtonPublisher: Da Capo Press
ISBN: 9780306807336
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 310
Book Description
”To be young, good-looking, healthy, famous, comparatively rich and happy is surely going against nature.” When Joe Orton (1933–1967) wrote those words in his diary in May 1967, he was being hailed as the greatest comic playwright since Oscar Wilde for his darkly hilarious Entertaining Mr. Sloane and the farce hit Loot, and was completing What the Butler Saw; but less than three months later, his longtime companion, Kenneth Halliwell, smashed in Orton's skull with a hammer before killing himself. The Orton Diaries, written during his last eight months, chronicle in a remarkably candid style his outrageously unfettered life: his literary success, capped by an Evening Standard Award and overtures from the Beatles; his sexual escapades—at his mother's funeral, with a dwarf in Brighton, and, extensively, in Tangiers; and the breakdown of his sixteen-year "marriage" to Halliwell, the relationship that transformed and destroyed him. Edited with a superb introduction by John Lahr, The Orton Diaries is his crowning achievement.
Author: Joe OrtonDiary of a Somebody
Author: John LahrPublisher: Hal Leonard Corporation
ISBN: 9780879101244
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 76
Book Description
Screenplay to John Lahr's successful dramatization of The Orton Diaries that chronicles the last eight months of Joe Orton's life, his growing theatrical celebrity, and the corresponding punishing effect it had on his relationship with his friend and mentor Kenneth Halliwell, who murdered him on August 9, 1967, and then took his own life.
Prick Up Your Ears
Author: John LahrPublisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 9781504031479
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Story of murder/suicide of playwright Joe Orton and his lover, Ken Halliwell. When Orton, after years of unsuccessful collaboration with Halliwell, breaks away and achieves fame and fortune on his own, Halliwell cracks, hammers Orton to death and then kills himself.
Loot
Author: Joe OrtonPublisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1472517512
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 171
Book Description
A black farce masterpiece, Loot follows the fortunes of two young thieves, Hal and Dennis. Dennis is a hearse driver for an undertaker. They have robbed the bank next door to the funeral parlour and have returned to Hal's home to hide-out with the loot. Hal's mother has just died and the pair put the money in her coffin, hiding the body elsewhere in the house. With the arrival of Inspector Truscott, the thickened plot turns topsy-turvy. Playing with all the conventions of popular farce, Orton creates a world gone mad and examines in detail English attitudes at mid-century. The play has been called a Freudian nightmare, which sports with superstitions about death - and life. It is regularly produced in professional and amateur productions. First produced in London in 1966, Loot was hailed as "the most genuinely quick-witted, pungent and sprightly entertainment by a new, young British playwright for a decade" (Sunday Telegraph). The Student Edition offers a plot summary, full commentary, character notes and questions for study, besides a chronology and bibliography.
The Kenneth Williams Letters
Author: Russell DaviesPublisher: HarperCollins UK
ISBN: 0007291922
Category : Actors
Languages : en
Pages : 342
Book Description
Following the bestselling publication of THE KENNETH WILLIAMS DIARIES, the devastating self-portrait of one of our most loved and complex performers is completed with this marvellous selection of his letters. This is a wonderful treasure trove of correspondence with all manner of people, including Alec Guinness, Maggie Smith, Joe Orton, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, and the Stokers' Mess of HMS Leverton. Kenneth Williams took letters very seriously, and he was always disgusted by a morning that failed to provide him with some material to pore over. Letters called forth the performer in Williams in a way that his diaries never did: many of them are virtual comic monologues, and in general they suggest more strongly than the diaries the likeable and constructive side of a man who remains, nevertheless, as outrageous and 'difficult' as ever.
What The Butler Saw
Author: Joe OrtonPublisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1472536665
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 96
Book Description
"Joe Orton's last play, What the Butler Saw, will live to be accepted as a comedy classic of English literature" (Sunday Telegraph) The chase is on in this breakneck comedy of licensed insanity, from the moment when Dr Prentice, a psychoanalyst interviewing a prospective secretary, instructs her to undress. The plot of What the Butler Saw contains enough twists and turns, mishaps and changes of fortune, coincidences and lunatic logic to furnish three or four conventional comedies. But however the six characters in search of a plot lose the thread of the action - their wits or their clothes - their verbal self-possession never deserts them. Hailed as a modern comedy every bit as good as Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, Orton's play is regularly produced, read and studied. What the Butler Saw was Orton's final play."He is the Oscar Wilde of Welfare State gentility" (Observer)
Author: John K. Orton