Diary of a Somebody - Joe Orton's Diaries
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| Diary of a Somebody was written in the last eight months
of Orton's life and chronicles his first real experience of literary
success. Orton's agent had first suggested a diary in 1965. But then with
Orton's first play, Entertaining Mr. Sloan, closing on Broadway after
thirteen performances and his second play, Loot, a notorious flop in its
original, 1965 production, Orton had no faith in his future. The success
of Loot's revival in 1966 emboldened him. Just four months before he had
been threatening to quit the theatre. "I'm really quite capable of
carrying this out," he wrote to his agent. "I've always admired
Congreve who, after failure of The Way of the World, just stopped
writing".
Before Loot's success, Orton was promising; now he was suddenly major. His literary style and his life acquired new amperage. In the period in which he was writing his diary, Orton also wrote Funeral Games, a ghoulish capriccio about faith and justice. He also rewrote his first radio play The Ruffian on the Stair (1963) and the Erpingham Camp (1965) for the Royal Court double bill Crimes of Passion (1967); completed the screenplay Up Against It for the Beatles and wrote his farce masterpiece What the Butler Saw. When Orton's luck changed, so did his relationship with Kenneth Halliwell whom he'd met and moved in with during his first term at RADA (1951). To Orton, a green kid from Leicester, Halliwell was promise incarnate. He had everything Orton lacked: a car, a library, an education. He also had a good line in literary chat. Halliwell took control of Orton, educating him and filling him with dreams of literary glory. After a decade of literary failure and a six-month prison sentence (1962) for comically defacing library books Orton broke through. He'd found his voice. Halliwell never did. Diary of Somebody picks up the story when the power in the two men's lives had shifted irrevocably in Orton's favour. Orton had the big bank balance, the big name and the big future. Halliwell was, as he wrote, Secretary to Jo Orton. This dramatisation incorporates letters, taped material from sources from my biography, literary fragments and psychiatric reports. John Lahr |
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