[In the following essay, Sinfield deals with the ways in which Orton's plays increased awareness of and toleration for homosexual culture, while at the same time limiting his audience.]

OSCAR Wilde:
[Secrecy] seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvellous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it.(1)
JOE Orton:
The whole trouble with Western Society today is the lack of anything worth concealing.(2)

Joe Orton went to study at the Royal Academy for Dramatic Art in 1951, in the heyday of Terence Rattigan, Whitehall farces, religious verse-drama and Agatha Christie. The Wolfenden Report on homosexuality was still six years away, and the film Victim ten. Theatre was often ‘queer’, but it was always discreet. In the late 1950s, Orton showed no interest in the socially and politically aware plays of Osborne, Delaney, and Wesker, though they accompanied and contributed to a great increase in public discussion of homosexuality—by 1958 the Lord Chamberlain, the Crown official whose task it was to censor stage plays, was obliged to allow serious treatment of the topic. Orton and his lover Kenneth Halliwell were conducting a more distinctive and anarchic cultural critique by redesigning the covers of library books.³

However, in 1963, with the mysterious menace of Pinter's plays in the ascendancy, Orton wrote Entertaining Mr. Sloane. In 1966 Loot was successfully produced—London was swinging and ‘permissive’ and Orton was asked to write a film script for the Beatles. He died in 1967, the year when male homosexual acts were made legal (provided there were only two people, in private, over twenty-one, and not in the armed services, the merchant navy, the prisons, Northern Ireland or Scotland). In 1968 stage censorship ended, and explicit gay plays—Spitting Image, Fortune and Men's Eyes, Total Eclipse—were produced in London. Plays in the London theatre in 1969 besides Orton's What the Butler Saw included Boys in the Band, Oh, Calcutta! and Hair; it was the year when the unprecedented resistance of gays to police harassment at the Stonewall Inn in New York's Christopher Street led to the formation of the Gay Liberation Front. So Orton's involvement in theatre spans the crucial period when the scope for homosexuals, both in British society and in the theatre, was sharply contested. This was the period when Gay Liberation became conceivable.

This article explores how Orton's plays effected quite specific negotiations of these changing opportunities for theatre and male homosexuals (in this paper I discuss men in Britain; the histories of lesbians generally and of men in other countries, though partly similar, are distinct). Orton exploited and contributed to the process through which homosexuality gradually became publicly speakable, and, as theatre audiences split and reformed, he was a focus of ideological conflict. Yet, I will argue, the terms of that conflict finally trapped Orton and limited his audience and his sexual politics, particularly in the play critics have most praised, What the Butler Saw. I invoke another gay play as a possible model for a gay cultural politics.

SILENCE AND THE CLOSET

Typically, from Ibsen to Christie and Rattigan, naturalistic plays disclose a danger to the social order. Often it takes the form of a socially unacceptable character—an outlaw-intruder who threatens the security of the characters and, by inference, the audience. Usually the problem is satisfactorily contained at the final curtain, though dissident authors might suggest that the disruptive intruder or misfit manifests in some ways a superior ethic or wisdom.⁴ Pinter's plays reorganized this pattern. In them the sense of mysterious, ominous presence is often embodied in an intruder, though now its focus is not social propriety but an unstable compound of metaphysical vacuity and sexual challenge. Its ultimate residence may be the psyche of the threatened character. Notoriously, the danger hovers also in silences in the dialogue, pregnant now not with class disapproval but with a loosely ‘existential’ anxiety about emptiness and disintegration.

The outlaw-intruder pattern had obvious resonances for male homosexuals, especially of the middle and upper classes. They felt obliged to ‘pass’ as heterosexual, and thus themselves effected the intrusion of an ‘undesirable’ element into good society. They might fear the irruption of knowledge about homosexuality and hence their own exposure; further, they might themselves introduce the threatening lower-class person to whom they might be attracted (this was a common pattern and constituted the dominant concept of the homosexual liaison).⁵ J. R. Ackerley remarked, almost in passing, how he and his friends were ‘outcasts and criminals in the sight of the impertinent English laws’; Peter Wildeblood said in 1955 that he ‘would be the first homosexual to tell what it felt like to be an exile in one's own country’.⁶ Homosexuality hovered upon the edge of public visibility, defining normality against a deviation so horrific that its occurrence could scarcely be admitted.

Pinter's version of the outlaw-intruder was apposite to homosexuality at this time: both were imagined as mysterious and violent, lying in wait in the silences, explicitly nowhere but, by so much, potentially everywhere. Homosexuality might manifest itself as an over-emphatic and hence potentially violent inflection in a relationship. It might even be lurking, scarcely recognized, in the psyches of ‘normal’ people. Most of Pinter's early plays have a homosexual inflection. There are intense male relationships in The Birthday Party (Goldberg and McCann; 1958), The Dwarfs (1960), The Caretaker (1960) and The Dumb Waiter (1960). In The Birthday Party Stanley resists Lulu's advances and is ‘mothered’ by Meg; in The Homecoming (1965) Lenny boasts of violent relations with women but is easily disconcerted by Ruth. It is not that these plays are ‘really’, ‘underneath’, about homosexuals; to say that would be to override the ambiguity which at the time was crucial. During those decades of discretion we should not imagine homosexuality as there, fully formed like a statue shrouded under a sheet until ready for exhibition. The closet (as discreet homosexuality was named when it came under scrutiny in the 1960s) did not obscure homosexuality—it created it. Freud makes a similar point when he disputes that one should expect to find ‘the essence of dreams in their latent content’: the important thing is the dream-work which produces such images.⁷ Similarly, oblique homosexual representation should be studied for the process that constitutes it so, and for the social reasons that demand such a process.

As censorship gradually relaxed, Pinter wrote The Collection (1961). There is tension in the (evidently) homosexual relationship of Harry and Bill and in the marriage of Stella and James because, it emerges, there is a question whether sexual congress has occurred between Stella and Bill. Homosexuality is to be inferred from the usual stereotypical cues—the ‘artistic’ menage of Harry and Bill, the fact that Bill is a dress designer, and the domineering attitude of the wealthier and older Harry. Martin Esslin deduces that Bill may have wanted to sleep with Stella because he ‘may have been made into a homosexual by an older man who offered him social advancement, a good job, life in a middle-class milieu’.⁸ We never find out what ‘actually happened’, of course. The need to infer the sexuality of Harry and Bill produces an additional layer of obscurity. Customary discreet indirection about homosexuality feeds neatly into Pinter's blend of mystery and menace.

While the Chamberlain's power persisted, Pinteresque mystery was a convenient mode for handling homosexuality on the stage. In The Trigon, by James Broom Lynne (produced at the Arts theatre in 1963), Arthur and Basil are presented through manifest homosexual hints—as the play opens, Arthur is wearing Boy Scout uniform and playing a record of ‘Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy’. Their intentions towards their friend Mabel are evidently half-hearted (compare Stanley and Lulu in The Birthday Party)—it is said that if they both addressed her ‘She wouldn't know which way to turn.’⁹ But there is no indication of sexual feeling, as such, between the two men. The intruder, Charles, is also mysterious—though compatible with the stereotypical notion that homosexuals gain satisfaction from breaking up other people's relationships. He expels Basil and Arthur from their flat, but it is suggested that they will be better for the self-knowledge he has produced: ‘It's no good either of us thinking of Mabel. Or any other woman for that matter. We'll make plans for each other. No third party’ (p. 152).

This conclusion ought to mean that Arthur and Basil come to terms with their sexual relationship, but that cannot be shown. Inexplicitness makes The Trigon unactable outside its time. Of course Basil and Arthur are discreet about homosexuality (if wearing a Boy Scout uniform and playing ‘The Sugar-Plum Fairy’ is discreet). And they may delude themselves about the chances of making it with Mabel. But there is no dramatic reason for them to be discreet when they are alone together. The reason is extra-dramatic: they are being overheard by the audience, and this makes their privacy public and subject to censorship. To the reviewer of Theatre World (July 1964) the characters were ‘inexplicably bound together emotionally’. The mystery in this play has nothing to do with the absurdist project usually attributed to Pinter, it is simply the limits of what James Broom Lynne was allowed to say.

ENTERTAINING HOMOSEXUALITY

Entertaining Mr. Sloane followed The Trigon into the Arts theatre in 1964 and was published in the same volume of Penguin Modern Plays. The whole manner was in the air, provoked by the demands of speaking the unspeakable in the conditions of that moment. However, Orton's use of ‘Pinteresque’ indirect dialogue and the mysteriously powerful intruder is cunning and distinctive. He incorporates them into the action, making them required by the concerns of the characters. We understand the middle-aged Eddie to be homosexual because it is the only way of making sense of his toleration of Sloane, his interest in Sloane's physique and sex life, and his horror of heterosexuality. Eddie is indirect in his approach to Sloane because he assumes he must be cautious. Sloane evidently reads this indirection: he suggests that Eddie is ‘sensitive’. But Eddie denies it, insisting, ‘I seen birds all shapes and sizes and I'm most certainly not … um … sensitive’ (p. 204). Sloane carefully plays Eddie along because, as Orton explained, Sloane knows the score but ‘isn't going to give in until he has to’.¹⁰

In Sloane obscurity and indirection make sense within the action as the inhibitions of discretion. The play makes apparent the operations of the closet; it comments on the discretion of the censor and polite society, as well as being subject to it. Orton also makes sense of ‘Pinteresque menace’. The attractive youth, Sloane, has killed a man who wanted to photograph him, and this danger is not merely arbitrary, metaphysical, or paranoid, but part of that experienced all the time by homosexuals. In Serious Charge by Philip King (1955) and The Children's Hour by Lillian Hellman (1934; produced at club theatres in 1950 and 1956) an attractive, dishonest and violent young person tries to ruin a plausibly homosexual adult by accusing him/her of homosexuality (the accusations are false, but suspicion is allowed to remain, humouring conventional notions about artistic, bachelor vicars and intense, unmarried lady schoolteachers). In actual life, often, homosexuals are subject to violent assault and murder. By the end of the play Sloane has killed two men, and Kath and Eddie are rash to assume that he won't kill again.

The changed use of obliquity and innuendo in Orton's plays was possible partly because, by the mid-1960s, understanding was no longer the special secret of a few. A perverse benefit from the witch-hunt against homosexual men in the early 1950s was enhanced visibility and a great increase in public discussion—provoked also by the Kinsey Report (1948). In the United States, where persecution was even more vigorous, John D'Emilio observes that ‘attacks on gay men and women hastened the articulation of a homosexual identity and spread the knowledge that they existed in large numbers’.¹¹ Commentators have often observed that in the 1950s homosexuality came to be considered less an evil or a sin, and more a medical or psychological condition. That is true, but also, increasingly, it was discussed as a problem. A Church of England pamphlet was called The Problem of Homosexuality (1954). This was the era of the problem (juvenile delinquency, unmarried mothers, the colour bar, latch-key children …); and it involved an expectation that the state would encourage public discussion and then pass laws to improve matters. The Wolfenden Committee on homosexual offences (and prostitution) was set up in 1954 after a minister for home affairs declared: ‘Quite clearly, this is a problem which calls for very careful consideration on the part of those responsible for the welfare of the nation.’ By the end of the decade Gordon Westwood believed that his 1952 objective, of bringing ‘the problem of homosexuality … out into the open where it can be discussed and reconsidered’, had been achieved.¹² Homosexuality was no longer unspoken. When The Killing of Sister George by Frank Marcus was playing at Wimbledon in 1967, Orton prophesied: ‘I don't suppose they'll understand what the play is about.’ ‘Don't you believe it,’ Halliwell replied, ‘They'll know very well what it's about.’ Orton acknowledges: ‘He was right. It became clear, from the opening scenes, that they understood and weren't amused.’¹³

They could have found out from BBC radio comedy. In 1960 Peter Burton experienced the homosexual slang ‘Polari’ as ‘our own camp secret language with which we could confound and confuse the naffs (straights)’.¹⁴ But from 1964 Polari expressions such as ‘bona’ (attractive), ‘varda’ (look at), ‘omee’ (man) and ‘polonee’ (woman) featured regularly in the dialogue of two very camp men in the Light Programme comedy series Round the Horne, with Orton's friend Kenneth Williams as Julian (Jules) and Hugh Paddick as Sandy. Here is a typical instance from March 1967, with the couple as journalists:

PADDICK:
Can we have five minutes of your time?
HORNE:
It depends what you want to do with them.
WILLIAMS:
Well, our editor said, Why don't you troll off to Mr Horne's lattie …
HORNE:
Flat or home—translator's note.
WILLIAMS:
And have a palare with him …(15)

For regular listeners, as well as for gays, the ‘translation’ would be unnecessary. Its offer was part of the joke, signifying that the private was in the process of becoming public. In 1967-8 the laws on homosexuality and stage censorship were changed. By 1969 Lou Reed was a cult hero, and by 1972 Alice Cooper and David Bowie took gender-bending into the pop charts. Unevenly, in diverse institutions, homosexuality was becoming less secret.

HE DO THE POLICE

In the heyday of Noël Coward, audiences divided according to whether they would pick up hints of homosexuality. From the mid-1960s the split was hardly over decoding competence, but around a contest as to what could be said in public. Homosexual nuances in Coward's plays either were not heard, or they were rendered tolerable by the acknowledgement (in their indirection) that such matters should not be allowed into public discourse. As homosexuality became more audible, it became the subject of explicit contest.

Some people were certainly upset. When Sloane was considered for television the company's legal officer thought it disgusting: ‘Perfectly horrible and filthy. I don't know why we want to consider such a play.’¹⁶ She had understood what it was about. Outside London, Loot provoked walk-outs—‘Bournemouth Old Ladies Shocked’, reported The Times.¹⁷ But the shockable audience understood that homosexuality (and other such causes) were at issue. Furthermore, it was confronted by another audience, associated typically with the Royal Court theatre, that wanted to see progressive plays. In the subsidized sector of theatre especially, the left-liberal intelligentsia was winning space for its kinds of representation—to the extent that a ‘taboo’ subject like homosexuality was hardly challenging to the people likely to attend a production known to feature it. This audience had come to indulge what was being called ‘permissiveness’, and felt confirmed in their progressive stance. In 1966 Frank Parkin found between 75 and 94 per cent (depending on social class) of CND supporters agreeing that laws against homosexual acts by consenting adults should be repealed.¹⁸ While Sloane was running, establishment West End producers complained fiercely about ‘dirty plays’—particularly at the subsidized Royal Shakespeare Company. Their objections were used to advertise Sloane—so far from being a disadvantage, the scandal was played up.¹⁹ Compare what happened when Wilde was arrested: An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest had been attracting large audiences, but Wilde's name was taken off the hoardings and the plays soon closed.²⁰

However, Entertaining Mr. Sloane does contain a challenge for a progressive audience (this was my experience). It resides not in the homosexuality, but in the lack of interpersonal feeling which, in the character of Sloane, produces psychopathic violence. This disappoints a left-liberal pleasure in Sloane's initially relaxed attitude to homosexuality, and frustrates a wish to see diverse kinds of sexuality justified by the affective quality of the relationship. Further, progressive plays generally presented the young person as a victim of the grown-ups (for instance, A Taste of Honey by Shelagh Delaney, Five Finger Exercise by Peter Shaffer, Roots and Chips with Everything by Arnold Wesker). In part Sloane is such a victim—at the end Kath and Eddie are able to force him into their ‘family’.²¹ But he is also the unsocialized hooligan whom conservatives were invoking as grounds for clamping down on all youthful self-expression. He is set up in some ways as the attractive character among the four, but kicking old men to death is carrying intergenerational conflict a bit too far.

Loot was better attuned to the liberal-progressive audience (I went with a group of fellow students—it was someone's birthday). The play is on the side of the boys, Hal and Dennis, and attacks officialdom and traditional moral attitudes. Some of the dialogue is in a discreet manner, but deployed so as to challenge hypocrisy and bogus formality (‘And even the sex you were born into isn't safe from your marauding’).²² Above all, Loot excited the youthful left-liberal intelligentsia by its treatment of the police and the law. During the relative social harmony of the 1950s, unusually, the image of the friendly ‘bobby’ was relatively unchallenged (though homosexuals always had reason to distrust it). But repressive attitudes to political demonstrations from around 1960, and then to drugs, gradually shifted left-liberal opinion. In 1965, while Orton was writing Loot, the case of Detective Sergeant Harold Challenor came to prominence. He had arrested, beaten, and planted a brick and an iron bar on people demonstrating against the Greek monarchy (because it sponsored the fascist dictatorship in Greece). Orton, says Kenneth Williams, became ‘obsessed with Challenor’, and as the play was reworked the part of Inspector Truscott was developed.²³

It is not usually stressed that Orton's critique of police malpractice goes far beyond anything previously seen in the theatre, or indeed other media.

TRUSCOTT:
(shouting, knocking HAL to the floor). Under any other political system I'd have you on the floor in tears!
HAL:
(crying). You've got me on the floor in tears.
TRUSCOTT:
And you complain you were beaten?
DENNIS:
Yes.
TRUSCOTT:
Did you tell anyone?
DENNIS:
Yes.
TRUSCOTT:
Who?
DENNIS:
The officer in charge.
TRUSCOTT:
What did he say?
DENNIS:
Nothing.
TRUSCOTT:
Why not?
DENNIS:
He was out of breath with kicking.(24)

To have such things said in public, I recall, was as exciting as the relaxed attitudes to homosexuality attributed to Hal and Dennis. In the closing moments McLeavy tells Truscott ‘You're mad!’ The response recalled the Challenor case: ‘Nonsense, I had a check-up only yesterday’ (p. 274). Orton even worked into the text Challenor's actual words, reported in court: ‘You're fucking nicked, my old beauty.’²⁵ Hilariously, the Lord Chamberlain would not allow ‘fucking’. With the repressive state apparatus starkly displayed, he was still chasing after naughty words.

Introducing Loot, Simon Trussler said it outrages ‘every expectation of a morally appropriate outcome’. However, in an article Trussler remarked the difference between ‘kinds of audiences’: one kind ‘may understand Loot because they share its moral assumptions’, the other will prefer Whitehall farces and ‘either ignore Loot or hate it’.²⁶ For left-liberals its critique was exhilarating. McLeavy's fate does not trouble us much, for he has foolishly worshipped the authority that victimizes him. The ending of Loot is triumphant because it displays most completely, in Truscott's behaviour, the corruption of established power and authority. (The effect is similar in the last moments of at least two other early-1960s new-wave plays, Wesker's Chips with Everything and Giles Cooper's Everything in the Garden.) Further, the final lines propose that Hal, Dennis, and Fay should all live together. This arrangement offers to resolve unconventionally but pleasantly a tension among the three most likeable characters. In fact it is exactly the happy ending of Noël Coward's Design for Living (1932). But times have changed and in Loot the idea can no longer be welcomed innocently—‘People would talk. We must keep up appearances’ (p. 275). In so far as this does not repudiate the menage à trois as such, it is pleasing to left-liberals and, in so far as it exposes the hypocrisy of ‘people’ once more, it is a final blow against convention.

After difficulties in the provinces, Loot was a hit in London. Its success could be partly because traditionally-minded people enjoyed feeling indignant—Hal says of his father, ‘His generation takes a delight in being outraged.’²⁷ But mainly it was because younger people were excited by it.

THE MOMENT OF ORTON

The 1960s intensified both libertarian and reactionary attitudes and their conflict was staged in the theatre. These were the circumstances that permitted Orton's notoriety. Earlier, he would not have been tolerated; later he would not be so significant (though he would be the subject of determined recuperation). We might call it the moment of Orton. The plays' prominence depended on the social atmosphere of the 1950s—which produced and talked anxiously about, but did not enact, Wolfenden. They were written to scandalize the Aunt Ednas (and remember, this ‘middlebrow’ follower of theatre was invented by Rattigan). But the condition of their presentation and success was the fact that discretion and the audience that assumed it were already under pressure. By making visible the structure of the closet, the plays helped to make its dismantling possible. The 1960s liberalization that helped make Orton a celebrity, therefore, also set a limit to his moment.

Orton (like most people) had difficulty seeing himself as part of a trend. He enjoyed watching audiences upset by Loot, and believed his ‘authentic voice’ was ‘vulgar and offensive in the extreme to middle-class susceptibilities’.²⁸ He scarcely realized that they were already on the run and that there was enthusiastic support for the critique he was mounting. This is partly because he had few links with the student culture of the subsidized theatre audience and distrusted its earnestness. He had studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in the early 1950s, well before the student radicalism of the CND generation, and his attitudes to homosexuality and theatre tended to assume the milieu of Coward or Rattigan. (Osborne partly shared Orton's background, and this helps to explain his poor fit with the progressive movement he initiated. He edged back to the discreet, upper-class theatrical world of Rattigan in Hotel in Amsterdam (1968) and West of Suez (1971). Orton wanted commercial managements to present his plays. He thought Kenneth Tynan wouldn't dare include ‘Until She Screams’, the sketch he submitted for Oh, Calcutta! in 1967; but this piece had basically been written in 1960. As Simon Shepherd remarks, Orton ‘had a rather inflated idea of his own shockingness: they did dare do his sketch. Orton's underestimate of the sexual “liberation” of others is a mark not just of his vanity but of his isolation.’²⁹

The confusions of the moment of Orton were manifested institutionally. So vigorous was the left-liberal theatre audience that it encroached on the West End, partly through the efforts of progressive impresarios to make a distinctive space for themselves. Michael Codron and Donald Albery were looking for ‘disturbing’ plays, and hence keen to produce Sloane; Codron thought it ‘might turn out to have the most exciting commercial possibilities since The Caretaker’.³⁰ By the mid-1960s the boundary between West End and subsidized theatre was blurred, and Orton was unclear about where he belonged. His Ruffian on the Stair and The Erpingham Camp were presented by the Royal Court (in 1967), and when Loot wasn't going well Orton doubted whether it was right for commercial theatre and thought of putting it into the Royal Court or the National.³¹

More damagingly, Orton's commercial success kept him among the older type of discreet theatre homosexual, who identified with a privileged, leisure-class outlook in which conservative attitudes to homosexuality and theatre went together and constituted an inevitable and largely desirable state of affairs.³² They believed—rightly—that more openness would spoil their kind of accommodation to homosexuality (even as it spoiled the Orton moment). In his diaries Orton shows virtually no interest in other gay plays, or in the new ‘fringe’ companies, or in moves to abolish stage censorship, or even in the legalization of male homosexuality. Rattigan commented: ‘Orton thought it very funny that I, of all people, should have thought his play so good.’³³ Actually, they were not so far apart, for Orton's satire depended on Rattigan's world.

WHO SAW THE BUTLER?

What the Butler Saw includes powerful satire against the oppressive constructions of medicine and psychiatry, and creates continuous gender confusion, with cross-dressing and ‘inappropriate’ sexual advances. But it was not too disturbing for Orton's discreet friends. They were very enthusiastic about it³⁴ and encouraged him to have it produced by Binkie Beaumont and Tennents, with Ralph Richardson, at the Haymarket—in other words, in the heart of traditional West End theatre. Evidently Orton thought he was setting a trap: he wanted a conventionally ‘lovely’ set so that ‘When the curtain goes up one should feel that we're right back in the old theatre of reassurance.’³⁵ But Orton doesn't consider why Beaumont should want to do the play; it is he, Orton, who was trapped. Commentators agree that the text was played without flair—it wasn't the censor (by then defunct) who would not allow Churchill's ‘missing part’ to be produced on stage, but Richardson, the Beaumont star.³⁶ The production pleased neither of the divergent audiences who were striving to claim theatre for their point of view.

Nevertheless, What the Butler Saw has been praised by the best commentators on Orton. Albert Hunt suggests that it ‘would, presumably, have been revised and tightened had he lived’, but still admires the way it destroys ‘the sexual stability on which the mechanics of bedroom farce depend’.³⁷ Hunt adduces the description by Dr. Prentice of his wife:

My wife is a nymphomaniac. Consequently, like the Holy Grail, she's ardently sought after by young men. I married her for her money and, upon discovering her to be penniless, I attempted to throttle her. She escaped my murderous fury and I've had to live with her malice ever since.³⁸

It had been complained that if Mrs. Prentice is indeed so liberal about sex then the principal motive of the action becomes absurd—namely her husband trying to keep from her his attempt to seduce his secretary. This is the point, says Hunt: the logic of farce collapses.³⁹ But that logic requires the assumptions of a 1950s farce audience. By 1969 very many people no longer believed that it is important to conceal adultery, that Christian imagery is sacrosanct, even that female sexual desire is shocking and/or funny. Brian Rix, sponsor of the Whitehall farces, had remarked in 1966: ‘with the more tolerant climate there now is, we could put on a farce about adultery and our audience wouldn't bat an eyelid.’ And he attributed ‘the more liberal attitude’ partly to Royal Court plays. Orton was not unaware of the issue. In the same article he is quoted as complaining: ‘A lot of farces today are still based on the preconceptions of a century ago, particularly the preoccupations about sex. But we must now accept that, for instance, people do have sexual relations outside marriage.’⁴⁰ Things were moving faster than he realized. Back in 1962, Giles Cooper's Everything in the Garden was powerful when it showed conventional middle-class people finding themselves involved in prostitution and murder and getting used to the idea. In 1969, for many people, the concern in Butler [What the Butler Saw] with adultery and nakedness was merely quaint—and the speech about Mrs. Prentice's ‘nymphomania’ sounded like it was straining to shock (and nothing is done with Prentice's ‘murderous fury’). Progressive audiences would be disappointed at the failure to develop the homosexual theme after the initial interview between Prentice and Nick.

Simon Shepherd observes that instead of a return to order at the end of What the Butler Saw, incestuous desire is revealed. He believes the audience, ‘like any comedy audience … sees itself to be like the characters in expecting an ending to disorder; but discovers that ending to be alien and uncomfortable. Thus trapped the audience is driven wild. The first performances succeeded: people stormed out or barracked the players.’⁴¹ But suppose one did not find incest between consenting adults so very terrible? To be sure, the play upset some of Richardson's older admirers in the preliminary week in Brighton (I saw it there). And it was booed and jeered on the opening night in London, though this was not a naïve response but an organized campaign by the group of gallery firstnighters, followers of traditional theatre, that had already disrupted Colin Spencer's Spitting Image a few months previously.⁴² But—my title question—who was afraid of Joe Orton? Was it important to taunt those people in 1969, especially at the price of framing Butler in terms they would react against? The play's title, which refers to ancient seaside machines showing ‘sexy’ pictures of women's knickers and suspenders for a penny, was of course meant to be ironic, but it holds Orton bound to the framework of attitudes that he wants to oppose. Furthermore, he could affront the Aunt Ednas only by failing to engage with other audiences. A different kind of farce, plucking at the susceptibilities of a sophisticated liberal audience, was just ahead in the work of Alan Acykbourn and Michael Frayn. And plays on explicit gay themes—The Killing of Sister George, When Did You Last See My Mother?, Staircase, Spitting Image, Fortune and Men's Eyes, The Madness of Lady Bright, Total Eclipse—had been produced in London (most of these began in ‘alternative’ venues; all but the last two transferred to the West End).

Jonathan Dollimore has also praised Butler: he calls it ‘black camp’, and remarks the irony, parody and pastiche, held together by ‘a stylistic blankness’. He argues that the play insinuates ‘the arbitrariness and narrowness of gender roles, and that they are socially ascribed rather than naturally given’.⁴³ The play is thus in the mode of Wilde who, Dollimore shows, validates the artificial, the non-natural, the insincere. Wilde thus subverts the demand for depth—for authenticity, sincerity and the natural; and these are ‘dominant categories of subjectivity which keep desire in subjection’.⁴⁴ So we may see that sexual relations are not essentially thus or thus, but are based on manners, convention, custom, ideology, power. This is indeed what Butler does some of the time. It ‘becomes a kind of orgy of cross-dressing, gender confusion and hierarchical inversion’, and the dialogue calls into question the ‘natural’—in circumstances where the speaker is in fact mistaken, because of cross-dressing, about the ‘naturalness’ of the very example he is using.⁴⁵ But even so, much of the comedy depends on believing that such attitudes are outrageous, and that, whatever their clothes, Nick is really a boy and Geraldine really a girl. I am inclined to see Orton's refusal of depth as indicating weakness rather than strength. This is not the assured position, perhaps the arrogance, of Wilde; it is looking over its shoulder to see how Aunt Edna is responding.

There is an alternative strategy to Wilde's cultivation of artificiality, as Dollimore shows. It appropriates parts of the dominant discourse, asserting the naturalness of gay relations and seeking to use sincerity and authenticity against their usual implication. This strategy was cultivated by Radclyffe Hall and André Gide. Of course, it may be no more than a pathetic plea to be allowed to share the power of the oppressor. But, alternatively, it may seize the ideology of depth and authenticate the unorthodox. And hence it may contribute to the development of what Foucault calls ‘a reverse discourse’, whereby ‘homosexuality begins to speak on its own behalf, to forge its own identity and culture, often in the self-same categories by which it has been produced and marginalised, and eventually challenges the very power structures responsible for its “creation”.’⁴⁶

This latter was in fact the main strategy of the 1960s homosexual law reform campaign⁴⁷ and, shortly after Orton's death, of Gay Liberation—to produce and believe in positive representations of homosexuality (‘gay is good’; the validation of surface over depth was slightly later, stimulated by such diverse concepts as the pink economy, poststructuralism, and high-energy disco-dancing). Orton was out of step with that reforming tendency; he refused nature, depth, and sincerity at least partly because, although he felt an intuitive opposition to the prevailing sexual ideology, he had difficulty conceiving a positive view of the homosexual.⁴⁸ He was stuck, in other words, in the Orton moment.

To be sure, Orton shows an untroubled practice of homosexuality in some characters—Sloane, Hal and Dennis, perhaps Nick. But none of them is apparently a homosexual. The instance of that is the older, closeted Eddie in Sloane, and his devious exercise of power makes him unattractive. This is reminiscent of Coward who, I have argued elsewhere, validates deviant sexuality when it is part of a general bohemianism but makes his specifically homosexual characters unappealing.⁴⁹ Orton was very concerned that there should be nothing ‘queer or camp or odd’ about Hal and Dennis—‘They must be perfectly ordinary boys who happen to be fucking each other. Nothing could be more natural.’ He also objected to Eddie appearing camp.⁵⁰ This seems radical; it is against stereotypes and appropriates nature. On the other hand, ‘we're all bisexual really’ is the commonest evasion. Hal and Dennis are said to be indifferent to the gender of their partners (‘You scatter your seed along the pavements without regard to age or sex’).⁵¹ That was an unusual and disconcerting thought; it takes the implications of cross-dressing and superficiality quite literally; it could be utopian. But it also keeps a distance from very many actual homosexuals; it was not how Orton lived, or others that he knew. At this time male homosexuals were struggling to be gay, not to be indifferent to sexual orientation. Of course, we all think we want to get away from stereotypes. However, these are not arbitrary external impositions, but are implicated in the whole construction of sexuality in the modern world; they figure, positively and negatively, in gay self-understanding. You challenge them not by jumping clear but by engaging with them.

‘SPITTING IMAGE’

It may be that Dollimore's two strategies can be combined—so that the strategy of superficiality deconstructs normative assumptions about patriarchy, heterosexuality and the family, and then the strategy of sincerity asserts the claims of unorthodox sexuality. I would suggest that Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine (1979) does this. So does Spitting Image by Colin Spencer. This was produced in 1968, when the abolition of the Lord Chamberlain's censorship function made it suddenly possible to present plays that would make sense to and for a gay audience. To be sure, homosexuals had frequented discreet plays, even regarding theatre as a specially homosexual medium, but that discretion enshrined heterosexist assumptions. Spitting Image is written to make best sense to a gay audience eager for its own theatre. It opened at the Hampstead Theatre Club, a suitable location for a progressive audience, and proved strong enough to gain a brief West End transfer to the Duke of York's. There, The Times reported, it received ‘loud boos from the gallery and sustained applause from the stalls’: it upset the old-fashioned moralists and energized gays and radicals.⁵²

To general astonishment and fear, one partner in a male homosexual couple, Gary and Tom, conceives and bears a child (who calls them Daddy One and Daddy Two). Familiar structures are shifted onto this strange situation.

DOCTOR:
Yes, yes, any other symptoms, Mr Dart?
TOM:
Oh, just the normal ones, you know.
DOCTOR:
Normal?
TOM:
I mean, well, morning sickness in the first two months and then …(53)

Normality disintegrates in such a bizarre application. The relation of mother and infant is one of the strongest sites for the ideology of sincerity, nature, and depth, but its images scatter. ‘It's so difficult to adjust to … one gets so used to the idea of mother, like you know, on those TV commercials’ (p. 33). The play misses no opportunity to get the language of patriarchy, family, and heterosexuality to entangle itself. When a girl friend tries to kiss him Gary retreats: ‘It's wrong. I'm a mother … I can't go around kissing girls’ (p. 37). The authorities want to get hold of the parent and child, and decide that their tactic should be to ‘break up the family unit’ (p. 35): they use the term ‘family’ even as they plot against Gary and Tom because they are not a family.

But also, as they struggle against hostile officials and stereotypes, the gay couple appropriate the genuine and human. A psychiatrist asks: ‘and would you say that you are the active partner of this relationship?’ Tom replies: ‘Eh? No, not really. I mean, it comes and goes. Sometimes one thing, sometimes another’ (p. 28). I recall people in the audience applauding at this repudiation—in public—of one of the heterosexual myths that aspire to organize gay sexuality. Gary and Tom are not sentimentalized—most of the time they are bickering because of the strain of the situation (‘Doctor Spock says that parents often find it difficult to adjust’ (p. 33)). John Russell Taylor found them ‘an entirely believable married couple, living and growing together and apart. Few heterosexual plays have done this so well.’⁵⁴

Of course, gay men were to repudiate the manoeuvre that ‘tolerates’ us so long as we appear to approximate to supposed heterosexual norms (though in 1968 this was a provocative claim). However, Spitting Image never allows the heterosexist values that it is appropriating to settle down. It both subverts the ideology of depth and claims it for gays. It would be difficult to say which is happening when Gary, disappointed at Tom's lesser commitment, makes an emotive speech about parenthood:

You're all surface aren't you mate? All you think about is the kind of place we live in, your pay packet, the films, plays, dinner-parties we used to go to. That was all your whole bloody life. Haven't you ever stopped for one minute and thought that we've created a new human being, a tiny creature who looks for us for love, guidance and security, who trusts both of us absolutely?

(p. 36)

It is an appeal to depth, embedded in a situation where it must be absurd. Spencer said he wanted to present both the reality of a love relationship and the responsibility of having a child, and a farcical attack on bureaucracy: ‘The whole play's style had to change gear constantly.’⁵⁵

The civil service and government assume that such offspring must be studied, hidden, and prevented:

The confusion would be unimaginable, it would distort the whole legal system.. Think of the manpower lost in the professions and industries if these damned pansies are always prancing off becoming mothers. … Homosexuals of all races, colours and creeds would suddenly be given the hope of creating offspring. And what is more likely than that the offspring themselves will have the same sexual abnormalities. The whole world would be overrun—ugh!

(pp. 33-4)

This homophobic utterance deconstructs itself by invoking the potential of what was soon to be called gay power. Indeed, it transpires, in the play, that many such children are being conceived. Daddy One responds by organizing a national movement (though Daddy Two is initially apathetic). The tactics are specifically reminiscent of the Suffragettes but also, in a stroke of inspiration, they anticipate the mass solidarity of Gay Liberation.

But don't you see? Before we were alone, utterly alone, a freakish development. Now we are stronger. … At first we're bound to be a deprived minority. The Government will be trying to hush the whole thing up. Well I'm not going to let it. …

(p. 40)

Spitting Image is organized around a biological impossibility—that is the repudiation of the conventional ideology of depth. But the ending is gloriously triumphant. Gary and Tom's offspring is not only unusually strong, intelligent and humane (he worries dreadfully about the Vietnam War), he is also able to infiltrate Downing Street at night and affect the Prime Minister's mind by auto-suggestion. As a result the law is changed, producing ‘happy homosexuals’ (p. 45). Daddy Two conceives. Nor is the effect limited to gays: Tom's mother is converted (‘Well if the papers say it's all right, I suppose it is’, p. 45), and the Prime Minister repudiates militarism. Gay Liberation correlates with peace and love generally; indeed, the genuine freeing of a major oppressed group, if it occurred, would perhaps amount to that.

Of course, the triumphant ending is even more of a fantasy than the rest—‘Funny how people's attitudes have changed’ (p. 45). But fantasies are important: they mark the boundaries of the plausible, and may help us to see that plausibility is a powerful social construction—dominated, of course, by patriarchy, heterosexuality, and the family. Nancy K. Miller has noted the way women writers are frequently accused of falling prey to implausibilities in their fiction. They are said to manifest sensibility, sensitivity, extravagance—‘code words for feminine in our culture’—at the expense of verisimilitude. But such ‘improbable’ plots may be read as comments on the prevailing stories of women's lives—they manifest ‘the extravagant wish for a story that would turn out differently’.⁵⁶ That is, the wish of women for power over their lives cannot be expressed plausibly within dominant discourses, only as fantasy. The improbability in Spitting Image is utopian, but it also alludes to that fact, and to the scale of social change that would have to occur for gays to become acceptably empowered.

Colin Spencer's play has continuing resonances for gay culture. The obvious analogue for its main situation now is the oppression of lesbian mothers, whose children are taken from them in the way that is attempted in Spitting Image. And the government decision to place the gay parents compulsorily in an ‘enclosed colony’, telling them they have ‘a rare disease’ (p. 39), is all too like modes of control that have been proposed for people with AIDS.

Gay men have found support in the notion that homosexuals have been creators of Art (well, it's got to be better than disc jockeys and royalty). To be sure, we can and should uncover the underlying gay significance in such work. But that very act tends to reinforce a notion that gay creativity must be covert. Decoding the work of closeted homosexual artists ought to produce a recognition of oppression, rather than a cause for celebration. Theatre has long been a site of homosexual culture, but it had always to be glimpsed through ostensibly heterosexual texts and institutions. Spitting Image represents a new break, because although in a public mode and a public venue, it is written not for the Aunt Ednas, but for gays. It appropriates theatre for an explicit gay culture, anticipating the Gay Sweatshop company. Other audiences are invited, but they will have the perhaps disconcerting experience—which gays have all the time—of sitting in on someone else's culture. Spitting Image signals the possibility of a non-closeted gay subculture.

It is through involvement in a subculture that one discovers an identity in relation to others and perhaps a basis for political commitment. A subculture creates a distinctive circle of reality, partly alternative to the dominant. There you can feel that Black is beautiful, gay is good. Such a sense of shared identity and purpose is necessary for self-preservation. However, subcultures may also return to trouble the dominant. They are formed partly by and partly in reaction to it—they redeploy its cherished values, downgrading, inverting or reapplying them, and thereby demonstrate their incoherence. Their outlaw status may exert a fascination for the dominant, focusing fantasies of freedom, vitality, even squalor. So they form points from which its repressions may become apparent, its silences audible.

Notes

1. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1949), p. 10.

2. Joe Orton, The Orton Diaries, ed. John Lahr (London: Methuen, 1986), p. 219.

3. In 1962 Orton and Halliwell were sent to prison for stealing and damaging library books: they made cover pictures bizarre and typed in false blurbs. See John Lahr, Prick Up Your Ears (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1980), pp. 93-105; Simon Shepherd, Because We're Queers (London: GMP, 1989), pp. 13-14.

4. See Alan Sinfield, ‘Theatre and politics’, in Malcolm Kelsall, Martin Coyle, Peter Garside and John Peck (eds), Literature and Criticism (London: Routledge, forthcoming); Alan Sinfield, ‘Closet dramas: homosexual representation in postwar British theatre’, forthcoming.

5. On the cross-class liaison, see Jeffrey Weeks, ‘Discourse, desire and sexual deviance: some problems in a history of homosexuality’, in Kenneth Plummer (ed.), The Making of the Modern Homosexual (London: Hutchinson, 1981), pp. 76-111, p. 105; Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society (London and New York: Longman, 1981), pp. 108-17; Alan Sinfield, Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989; Berkeley: California University Press, 1989), ch. 5; Sinfield, ‘Closet dramas’; Sinfield, ‘Private lives/public theatres: Noël Coward and the politics of homosexual representation’, forthcoming.

6. J. R. Ackerley, My Father and Myself (London: Bodley Head, 1968), p. 120; Peter Wildeblood, Against the Law (London: Weidenfeld, 1955), p. 55. On the marginal, scarcely audible status of homosexuality, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Epistemology of the closet (I)’, Raritan, 7 (1988), pp. 39-69; Jonathan Dollimore, ‘Homophobia and sexual difference’, in Sexual Difference, ed. Robert Young (special issue of Oxford Literary Review, 8, nos. 1-2; 1986), pp. 5-12; Jonathan Dollimore, ‘The dominant and the deviant: a violent dialectic’, Critical Quarterly, 28, nos. 1-2 (1986), pp. 179-92.

7. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New York: Avon Books, 1970), p. 545.

8. Martin Esslin, The Peopled Wound (London: Methuen, 1970), p. 129. John Marshall shows the persistence into the 1960s of the distinction between inverts (effeminate, anomalies in nature) and perverts (wilfuly debauched); see Marshall, ‘Pansies, perverts and macho men: changing conceptions of male homosexuality’, in Plummer, The Making of the Modern Homosexual, pp. 145-50.

9. James Broom Lynne, The Trigon, in John Russell Taylor (ed.), New English Dramatists 8 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965), p. 106. The Creeper, by Pauline McCauley (1964), was another ‘Pinteresque’/homosexual play: as in The Servant, for which Pinter wrote the screenplay, a leisure-class man employs a mysteriously menacing, lower-class companion (The Creeper also resembles The Green Bay Tree by Mordaunt Shairp, on which see Sinfield, ‘Private lives/public theatres’).

10. Lahr, Prick Up Your Ears, p. 178; for Sloane's awareness, see Joe Orton, The Complete Plays (London: Eyre Methuen, 1976), pp. 125, 135.

11. John D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 52. On the situation in the US theatre see Kaier Curtin, We Can Always Call Them Bulgarians (Boston: Alyson Publications, 1987).

12. H. Montgomery Hyde, The Other Love (1970); (London: Mayflower, 1972), p. 238; Gordon Westwood, A Minority (London: Longman, 1960), p. 93, referring back to Westwood's Society and the Homosexual (London: Gollancz, 1952). See D. J. West, Homosexuality, revised edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1960), pp. 11, 71; Jeffrey Weeks, Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain, from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (London: Quartet, 1977), ch. 14. Plays that figured in this process included The Green Bay Tree by Mordaunt Shairp (1933, revived in London in 1950); Third Person by Andrew Rosenthal (1951); The Immoralist by Ruth and Augustus Goetz (1954); South by Julien Green (1954); Serious Charge by Philip King (1955); The Prisoners of War by J. R. Ackerley (1925, revived in 1955); The Children's Hour by Lillian Hellman (1934, produced in London in 1956); The Lonesome Road by Philip King and Robin Maugham (1957); The Balcony by Jean Genet (1957); The Catalyst by Ronald Duncan (1958); Quaint Honour by Roger Gellert (1958); The Hostage by Brendan Behan (1958), Five Finger Exercise by Peter Shaffer (1958). Some of these evaded censorship by being produced at the ‘private’ Arts theatre club (see Sinfield, ‘Closet dramas’).

13. Orton, Diaries, p. 127.

14. Peter Burton, Parallel Lives (London: GMP, 1985), p. 42 and pp. 38-42; Weeks, Coming Out, pp. 41-2.

15. Barry Took, Laughter in the Air (London: Robson Books, 1981), pp. 153 and 146-55.

16. Orton, Diaries, pp. 78-9. On decoding and Coward, see Sinfield, ‘Private lives’.

17. Lahr, Prick Up Your Ears, pp. 250-1; see Orton, Diaries, p. 112.

18. Frank Parkin, Middle Class Radicalism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1968), p. 43. The figures were 94 per cent in social classes 1-2, 87 per cent in classes 3-4 and 75 per cent in classes 5-7. See Alan Sinfield, ‘The theatre and its audiences’, in Sinfield (ed.), Society and Literature 1945-1970 (London: Methuen, 1983).

19. Lahr, Prick Up Your Ears, pp. 206-7; Shepherd, Because We're Queers, pp. 119-20.

20. Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1987), p. 430.

21. See Shepherd, Because We're Queers, pp. 74-7, and his comments on the cult of The Boy, the fantasy answer to so many tensions of that time (pp. 60-4); this too was affronted by the character of Sloane. The US director had difficulty with Sloane's capricious murder of Kemp (Lahr, Prick Up Your Ears, p. 215).

22. Orton, Complete Plays, p. 200.

23. Lahr, Prick Up Your Ears, pp. 236-8, 255-6. Also it had been revealed shortly before that rhino whips were in use in a Sheffield police station. For another appreciation of the play from this point of view, see Albert Hunt, ‘What Joe Orton saw’, New Society, 17 April 1975, pp. 148-50.

24. Orton, Complete Plays, pp. 245-6; and see pp. 248, 255, 266, 271-5.

25. Orton, Complete Plays, p. 273; for the Lord Chamberlain's changes see Simon Trussler (ed.), New English Dramatists 13 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968), p. 84.

26. Trussler, introduction to Loot, in New English Dramatists 13, p. 11; Trussler, ‘Farce’, Plays and Players (June 1966), p. 72.

27. Orton, Complete Plays, p. 262.

28. Lahr, Prick Up Your Ears, p. 249; see also p. 227, and Orton, Diaries, pp. 75-6, 150.

29. Orton, Diaries, p. 91; Shepherd, Because We're Queers, p. 126.

30. Lahr, Prick Up Your Ears, p. 175.

31. Lahr, Prick Up Your Ears, pp. 247, 258.

32. This account is indebted to Simon Shepherd's Because We're Queers, especially pp. 26-8, 31, 56-8, 89, 97-8, 111. Shepherd calls the standard view of Orton as hampered and ruined by Halliwell ‘The Revenge of the Closet Queens’ (p. 26). I have benefited also from William A. Cohen, ‘Joe Orton and the politics of subversion’ (unpublished paper, University of California, Berkeley, 1989), and from the comments of Joseph Bristow, Peter Burton, William A. Cohen, Jonathan Dollimore, and Simon Shepherd.

33. Lahr, Prick Up Your Ears, p. 204. Rattigan put money into Sloane—he thought it was about a society diminished by watching television (Lahr, Prick Up Your Ears, p. 184). Like Rattigan, Orton was not straightforward about himself in interviews (Lahr, Prick Up Your Ears, p. 180; Shepherd, Because We're Queers, p. 86).

34. Orton, Diaries, pp. 249-50.

35. Orton, Diaries, p. 256. Butler was produced by Beaumont and Oscar Lewenstein at the Queen's Theatre in 1969.

36. Orton, Diaries, p. 256; Lahr, Prick Up Your Ears, pp. 330-3.

37. Hunt, ‘What Joe Orton saw’, p. 149.

38. Orton, Complete Plays, p. 368.

39. Hunt, ‘What Joe Orton saw’, p. 150.

40. Simon Trussler, ‘Farce’, Plays and Players (June 1966), pp. 58, 72. Orton also said: ‘There's supposed to be a healthy shock, for instance, at those moments in Loot when an audience suddenly stops laughing. So if Loot is played as no more than farcical, it won't work’ (p. 72). Orton seems to have abandoned this idea in Butler.

41. Shepherd, Because We're Queers, p. 96.

42. Orton, Diaries, pp. 256-7. Stanley Baxter is quoted there saying that the barracking started ten minutes after the start of the second act. I'm grateful here for a personal communication from Colin Spencer, author of Spitting Image (on which see below).

43. Dollimore, ‘The dominant and the deviant’, p. 189; and Dollimore, ‘The challenge of sexuality’, in Sinfield (ed.), Society and Literature, p. 78.

44. Jonathan Dollimore, ‘Different desires: subjectivity and transgression in Wilde and Gide’, Textual Practice, 1, 1 (1987), p. 59; see also Dollimore's Sexuality, Transgression and Subcultures, forthcoming.

45. Dollimore, ‘The dominant and the deviant’, p. 189; Orton, Complete Plays, p. 416.

46. Dollimore, ‘The dominant and the deviant’, pp. 180, 182; see also Dollimore, ‘Homophobia and sexual difference’, p. 8.

47. Weeks, Coming Out, chs. 14, 15.

48. So Shepherd, Because We're Queers, p. 111.

49. Sinfield, ‘Private lives’.

50. Lahr, Prick Up Your Ears, pp. 248, pp. 187, 189.

51. Orton, Complete Plays, p. 244.

52. Michael Billington, Times, 25 October 1968, p. 8. Spitting Image was favourably reviewed there and by Philip French in the New Statesman and Hilary Spurling in the Spectator. But Milton Shulman's review in the Evening Standard was headed ‘Ugh!’

53. Colin Spencer, Spitting Image, printed in Plays and Players, 16 (November, 1968), p. 28.

54. John Russell Taylor, review of Spitting Image in Plays and Players, 16 (November, 1968), p. 64.

55. Colin Spencer, interview with Peter Burton, Transatlantic Review, 35 (Spring 1970), p. 63. Spencer was moved partly by the attempt to gain access to his son, which was being opposed on the grounds of his homosexuality (personal communication).

56. Nancy K. Miller, ‘Emphasis added: plots and plausibilities’, in Elaine Showalter (ed.), The New Feminist Criticism (London: Virago, 1986), pp. 357, 352. See Sinfield, Literature, Politics and Culture, pp. 25, 225-6, 300-4.