GENERAL
Joe Orton
1 85459 4141
Published for the very first time: two short
novels in one volume co-written with his lover
Kenneth Halliwell
The two novels in this volume mark the beginning and the end of the seven-year-long writing partnership of Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell. Lord Cucumber, written in 1954 only a year after they graduated from RADA, is the earliest surviving product of their collaboration; The Boy Hairdresser, from 1960, is the last thing they wrote together and, thanks to Prick Up Your Ears, is the best known of Orton's unpublished work. The striking difference in mood between the two novels, from light comedy to brooding tragedy, seems to mirror their changing relationship.
In Lord Cucumber, Orton and Halliwell romp through an ineffably silly, unutterably camp pastiche of a vintage Mills and Boon romance topped off with borrowings from Ronald Firbank.
'Ramsrape, the butler, hovered in the doorway. Lady Cucumber's borzois, long-nosed, graceful, superbly elegant, waddled to meet them.'
By contrast, The Boy Hairdresser tells of the tortured relationship of two would-be angry young men, Donelly and Peterson. Astonishingly prophetic of their lives together, The Boy Hairdresser is a lasting monument to the tragic complexities of Orton and Halliwell's relationship.
'Suicide is an insult to the body... When he went he'd take others with him: five or six at least. Something for the Sunday papers to talk about...'
This is the third and final volume of Orton's 'lost' work. The first two, published in 1998, consisted of a novel, Between Us Girls, and two plays, Fred and Madge & The Visitors. All three carry expert and informative introductions by Francesca Coppa, who has lectured widely on Orton in Britain and the United States.
Joe Orton
Orton's first solo effort as a writer, dating from 1957, Between Us Girls is the fictional diary of Susan Hope, an oddly innocent 24-year-old would-be actress, who leaves the drab Soho of the 50s for a dubious nightclub engagement in Mexico - only to find herself the victim of a curiously harmless branch of the White Slave Trade. Escaping across the border to Los Angeles, she becomes a famous film star. Campily tongue-in-cheek, and consistently entertaining, it is full of characteristic comedy. Here for the first time is the earliest demonstration of that now much-loved genre: the Ortonesque.
'Consistently entertaining ... Brilliant comic writing ... Excellent introduction ...' John Mortimer, Mail on Sunday
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Joe Orton
Written in 1959, when he was 26, Fred and Madge is Orton's very first play. The title characters seem to be the stereotypical middle-aged couple, bored with each other, talking in clichés. But it turns out that Fred's job is to push boulders uphill like Sisyphus, and Madge's is to sieve water all day long. Further, since the action is repeatedly interrupted by a figure like a director, it seems they are inhabiting a play about themselves. Soon it is clear that London is being subsumed by rampant greenery and the whole cast goes into ecstasies of escape... Through it all shines Orton's extraordinary way with one-liners and with dialogue that reeks of hilarious sexual and social innuendo.
The Visitors, written in 1961, is a thoroughly convincing exercise in slice-of-life realism set in a hospital where the dying Kemp is visited by his middle-aged daughter, while the nurses spend more time on in-fighting than on patient care. Orton's next work was to be The Ruffian On the Stair and Entertaining Mr Sloane ...
'Here are the seeds of the later Orton plays ...' Philip Hoare, Observer
1 85459 354 4 : hbk | 1 85459 359 5 : pbk