Prick Up Your Ears
By Simon Bent
Directed by Daniel Kramer

Richmond Theatre 26th - 29th August
And then the Comedy Theatre 17th September onwards

The best thing that ever happened to Joe Orton was meeting Kenneth Halliwell; the worse thing possible was Joe Orton meeting Kenneth Halliwell. This play, based on the diaries of Joe Orton, centres on their life together and the ultimate destruction of one of the greatest talents of the sixties era and, dare one say it, one of the most innovative playwriting talents of all time.

Matt Lucas and Chris New sparkle as Kenneth Halliwell and Joe Orton and Gwen Taylor gives a superb vignette as Mrs Corden, their landlady. Normally when reviewers start to talk about the set it is because the play is suspect, definitely not so in this case. As Halliwell became more reclusive, so his decoration of the flat became more a part of his character. It is a delight to watch the development of the character of the flat as the play progresses and yet not once does it detract from substance of the plot. The designer, Peter McKintosh has revelled in producing the flat, to the exact dimensions, yet filling the stage and being able to have the collage steadily growing to fill the walls. Undoubtedly awards will follow and the same can be said of the rest of the cast. I may be the only person who has never seen an episode of Little Britain and yet even I know of its success, it is not easy to translate that TV experience to the stage and produce a complex, developing character such as Kenneth Halliwell. Matt Lucas succeeds magnificently as he takes the character from the rather old fashioned stodgy student through to the demented, drugged and doomed disaster that Halliwell became. He does have the advantage of the strong physical resemblance to the actual persona of Kenneth Halliwell. I am sure that was not a coincidence and likewise Chris New does have a strong resemblance to Joe Orton, however, he has also worked very hard in producing his character and developing the nuances that made Joe Orton such a superb playwright. The boyish, infectious love that they have initially steadily develops and grows into the old married couple they end up as. At some stage in the history of this couple one asks the obvious question, why did Orton not leave Halliwell? The answer is equally obvious, because he loved him, because Orton, the playwright needed him, because John Orton, the person was complete only with Kenneth Halliwell, just like so many tragic couples. Joe Orton’s death was a crime of passion and this production gave me that they real feeling. Congratulations must also go to the director, Daniel Kramer, for being able to recreate that passion.

There is a film of the same name and the temptation must have been to follow the Alan Bennett script. Simon Bent eschewed that and instead has given us a delightful new reading of the diaries, of course many of the incidents are the same, obviously so, as they are based upon an historic record and about real people. But plays are not films and they need a different dynamic and Simon has managed, with aplomb to do that. There are very funny moments and genuinely funny lines in this play, there are delightful characters that grow during the course of the play to show the fifteen years of real life that pass and there is then the tragic end. Simon Bent has also managed to give us the whole panoply of swinging sixties without ever leaving this one room.

Joe Orton is the only playwright that makes me laugh out loud when I read his scripts; unfortunately I then find it impossible to explain to the bemused onlookers as normally it is too rude to repeat. He loosely wrote in the ‘theatre of the absurd’ genre. I say loosely, as in reality it is difficult to compare him any other playwright. He wrote comedies, he wrote to make the audience laugh; he had a total disregard for the establishment and poked fun at them by placing his characters in normal situations and then giving them absurd lines to say which, unfortunately for the establishment, have a ring of truth about them. His sister, on seeing ‘Loot’ with him found it incredibly funny, but revealed to Joe that she wasn’t too sure if she understood it all. ‘That doesn’t matter, just as long as you laughed.’ That summed up this complex character. Life was about having fun and enjoying yourself. There could be no better time than the fifties and sixties in swinging London for the young Homosexual Joe Orton and his Friend Kenneth Halliwell. Students together at RADA, they decided to become writers, Kenneth gave Joe an education in literature and the younger John Orton showed Kenneth how to be gay. Unfortunately as Kenneth grew older his extremely troubled upbringing started to affect him. The life they led was very unconventional; they were friends with all the names of the times and in particular the late, great Kenneth Williams, yet lived together in a small, neat flat in the then very unfashionable Islington where Halliwell decorated the walls with a collage of pictures stolen from library books. Giving up ideas of acting and then writing and then of being an artist, he became more and more impotent and introverted both as a creative person, as a loving person and as a sexual person until, now existing on a diet of prescription and non prescription drugs he became paranoid and saw his only release as being the destruction of all that he loved and adored and that, unfortunately was Joe Orton and then himself. Not that Joe Orton was a saint himself. In a different age he would have been an anarchist or a terrorist or a rabble raiser of the first order ready to be hung or burnt at the stake but this was the sixties and London was swinging and Joe Orton was at the centre of it all. As it was he did six months for defacing library books, a harsh sentence despite the hundreds of books so defaced and many believed it was because of homosexuality that he was so punished. The result was he produced plays of outstanding quality, Entertaining Mr Slone(1964), Loot(1966), The Erpingham Camp(1967), What the Butler Saw(1969), are without parallel in the canon of English plays. As Orton was reaching a height of creative genius, so Halliwell reached his nadir. He read What the Butler Saw and made some suggestion to Orton and Orton records in his diary that the suggestion were excellent and incorporated them into the script, but on its completion Halliwell beat out Orton’s brains on the 10th August 1967.

Reviewed by Evan Rule