Prick
Up Your Ears: The Biography of Joe Orton by John
Lahr
John Lahr--New
Yorker critic, novelist, and biographer of his father Bert
Lahr (Notes on a Cowardly Lion)--reconstructs both the life and
death of Joe Orton in another extraordinary biography that was
chosen Book of the Year by Truman Capote and Nobel Prize-winning
novelist Patrick White when it first appeared in 1978.
"I have high hopes of dying in my
prime," Joe Orton confided to his diary in July, 1967. Less
than one month later, Britain's most promising comic playwright
was murdered by his lover in the London flat they had shared for
fifteen years. Lahr chronicles Orton's working-class childhood and
stage struck adolescence, the scandals and disasters of his early
professional years, and the brief, glittering success of his
blistering comedies, Entertaining Mr. Sloane, Loot, and What the
Butler Saw.
Prick Up Your Ears is a watershed
biography; it paved the way for Orton's revival and ensured his
rightful place in the English repertoire.
Prick
Up Your Ears (1987)
Gary Oldman is eerily transformed into Joe Orton, a hugely
talented, defiantly gay playwright who gained fame almost
overnight with his outrageous and viciously funny social comedies.
Alfred Molina co-stars as Orton's tormented lover, sometimes
collaborator and eventual murderer. Adapted from John Lahr's 1978
biography of Orton, this chilling and graphic portrayal of the
enfant terrible is a masterful tribute to a man who fearlessly
attacked restrictive morals and customs. Cut down in his prime,
Orton's legacy is well remembered here through scathingly witty
dialogue and stand-out performances by Oldman and Molina. A
brilliantly candid look at the gay scene in London during the late
'50s and early '60s and which feature interesting scenes of gay
cottaging.
Director: Stephen Frears
Starring: Gary Oldman,
Alfred Molina,
Vanessa Redgrave,
Julie Walters
Between
Us Girls : A Novel by Joe
Orton
Thirty years after his death, a work that
represents a turning point in Joe Orton's career is now available.
Between Us Girls is a comic novel, the diary of young would-be
actress Susan Hope, whose picaresque adventures lead her from life
on the London stage to servitude in the white slave trade of
Mexico, and ultimately to film stardom in Hollywood. Orton wrote
the novel in 1957. Between Us Girls is an extraordinary blend of
camp comedy and pent-up eroticism, featuring the first appearance
of the unique voice of a writer whose plays would later achieve
worldwide acclaim.
