[In the following essay, Innes discusses the farcical elements of Orton's plays, noting that his outrageous situations and characters celebrated anarchy in their depiction of the universality of the abnormal and the dishonest.]

Farce gained fresh relevance in the 1960s with Joe Orton's explosive, but short-lived eruption onto the English stage, which paved the way for Peter Barnes (see pp. 352ff. below) and influenced Howard Brenton's first short satirical pieces at the end of the decade. Savage and irreverent, Orton caught the sexual permissiveness and growing political dissent of the time. Yet although he struck a distinctive new note, his work was also a continuation of earlier trends.

Indeed, his first major farce, Loot (1965), clearly echoed Ben Travers' 1928 classic, Plunder, in its title as well as basic elements of its plot: a nurse who cuts the family out of her patient's will; a double robbery that brings police investigation; the threat of arrest for murder, and the use of blackmail to provide a resolution. At the same time, where Travers satirically presented this frenetic criminal activity as normal, Orton exaggerated it to the point of absurdity. The nurse is not just guilty of bigamy, but wholesale massacre—which is treated by the representative of law and order as a minor aberration: ‘Seven husbands in less than a decade. There's something seriously wrong with your approach to marriage’.¹ Similarly, the blackmail and bribery in Orton's play involve not just one, but all the characters, including the bereaved husband and the police inspector.

Even in Orton's last, most fully developed farce, What the Butler Saw (1969), there are echoes of Travers' Rookery Nook in a hapless husband's attempts to find a dress for a naked girl and the substitution of another, very different type of character for her. But again the situation is extended way beyond anything credible by multiplication and sexual reversals. Orton declared himself to be ‘a great admirer of Ben Travers, in particular’. Even so, he rejected the bowdlerization by which farce had become socially acceptable: ‘French farce goes as far as adultery, but by Ben Travers's time it was only suspected adultery, which turns out to have been innocuous after all’. Reacting against what he saw as having ‘become a very restricted form’ Orton parodied Travers' formula for farce by taking it to extremes.² So, while Orton was clearly working in the same tradition, he is also demolishing a recognizable type of theatre; and this iconoclasm corresponds to his overall aim, which was to be provocatively outrageous.

The first lines of Orton's earliest play, The Ruffian on the Stair (radio 1964, revised as part of a double bill, Crimes of Passion 1967), had already set the characteristic tone of his drama, with its open homosexual suggestion:

MIKE:
… I'm to be at King's Cross Station at eleven. I'm meeting a man in the toilet.
JOYCE:
You always go to such interesting places.(3)

Entertaining Mr. Sloane (1964) revolves around a competition between brother and sister for the sexual favours of an amoral youth. This already objectionable situation is milked for obscene possibilities. Not only does the frumpish middle-aged sister see the youth as her own illegitimate son, transposing carnal seduction into incest. When he beats her father to death (to avoid arrest for murdering the old man's employer) filial feeling becomes merely an excuse for the sister and her homosexual brother to blackmail each other into covering up his crime. Their awareness of each other's complicity then serves as a bargaining chip in arranging a ménage à trois with a vicious murderer.

This attack on traditional pieties of the family, and the denial of romantic ideals in making the seduction grotesque (the ‘girl’ being fat, twice the age of the youth—and with false teeth: an Orton trademark) is made doubly offensive by the conventional surface of the play. The setting of seedy naturalism, and the use of a sentimental comedy formula for a perverse action that the characters treat as perfectly acceptable behaviour, is designed to intensify the shock effect. Instead of nastiness being relegated to the woodshed, it is uncovered beneath the ordinary living-room carpet.

As his characters declare, for Orton ‘sexual licence’ was ‘the only way to smash the wretched civilization’; and explicitness replaces innuendo in his subsequent plays. Instead of being merely imaginary, as in Entertaining Mr. Sloane, in Loot incest is linked to necrophilia, with a son being required to strip his mother's corpse naked. What the son calls ‘a Freudian nightmare’ in that play then becomes an actual rape of mother by son in What the Butler Saw. But ‘licence’ on the stage is not only intended as a liberating image. Its primary function is to arouse the most violent reactions possible in the average (by definition bourgeois) audience: ‘Sex is the only way to infuriate them’, Orton noted when determining to ‘hot up’ the first draft of What the Butler Saw: ‘Much more fucking and they'll be screaming hysterics in next to no time’.⁴ At first his plays were remarkably successful in provoking such an extreme response—even if critical appreciation of their stylistic qualities had already defused their shock potential less than a decade later, turning them into ‘modern classics’ by the 1975 Royal Court Orton season.

In 1964 Entertaining Mr. Sloane was greeted with revulsion by most reviewers, and Orton contributed to the furore (under various pennames, including ‘Edna Welthorpe’—borrowing Terence Rattigan's symbol of the average middle-class philistine spectator). He deliberately sought to exacerbate public outrage by attacking any acceptance of his play through writing tongue-in-cheek letters to the press: such as, ‘In finding so much to praise in … a highly sensationalized, lurid, crude and over-dramatized picture of life at its lowest, surely your dramatic critic has taken leave of his senses’. And through ‘Edna’, who claimed to be ‘nauseated by this endless parade of mental and physical perversion’, Orton scripted the kind of audience reaction he wanted for his drama: ‘Today's young playwrights [referring specifically to himself] take it upon themselves to flaunt their contempt for ordinary decent people. I hope that the ordinary decent people of this country will shortly strike back!’⁵

This wish was fulfilled when public rejection forced the first production of Loot in 1965 to close before it reached London—although it won the award for Best Play of the Year in 1966—and What the Butler Saw was greeted with booing and hisses in Brighton and at the London opening in 1969. The violence remained verbal, but the antagonism between stage and audience was comparable to the Dublin riots over Synge's Playboy of the Western World or Sean O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars. The actor playing Orton's protagonist recalled ‘a guilty sense of exhilaration in fighting them [the spectators]. They really wanted to jump on the stage and kill us all.’

Orton turned farce into a weapon of class warfare: as he once remarked to an admirer, ‘I'm from the gutter … And don't you ever forget it because I won't’.⁶ The sharp incongruity between subjects like death, incest or insanity, and their comic treatment was the detonator. His humour is always deployed strategically.

The key to Orton's approach is his way of treating conventionally tragic or disgusting situations as a source of comedy. This both trivialized public standards of seriousness, and used the audience's laughter to challenge their moral principles. In Loot, for example, a funeral is turned into knockabout slapstick (indeed, the original title was Funeral Games—which Orton re-used for a 1968 TV play satirizing the church). Dumped out of her coffin to make place for stolen money, a murdered woman's body is exposed to every indignity in a running gag. Stripped naked, deprived of false teeth and glass eyes, shoved upside down in a cupboard, swathed in a mattress-cover and paraded as a dress-maker's dummy, the corpse becomes the prize in a game of hide-and-seek between her son and his undertaker-accomplice, the nurse who has murdered her and is wearing her dress, her husband whom the nurse plans to marry, and a corrupt police-inspector in disguise.

In the same way, verbal elegance is combined with scatological crudity, stylish epigrams with derisive aggression: ‘Why don't you shut your mouth and give your arse a chance’ (Entertaining Mr. Sloane); ‘It's Life that defeats the Christian Church. She's always been well-equipped to deal with Death’ (Funeral Games); ‘Have you taken up transvestism? I'd no idea our marriage teetered on the edge of fashion’ (What the Butler Saw)⁷

The contrast between presentation and subject is the key element in Orton's brand of farce. An observation about unemployed actresses discussing the penalties of old age defines his theatrical approach—‘It was a very sad scene because it was played in such a cheerful way’—and he extended this approach into every aspect of performance. On one hand, his dramatic situations are a collage of recognizable clichés borrowed from B grade movies, sitcoms and popular entertainment, corresponding to his perception that ‘in naturalistic plays, I couldn't make any comment on what kind of policeman Truscott is [in Loot], or the law, or the big general things of the Establishment’. Yet although he structured his plots as a controlled frenzy (his own term for them) in order to project an image of anarchic insanity, Orton continually stressed the need for realism. Presenting his dead mother's dentures as ‘the originals’ to the shocked actor playing the son in Loot, he remarks ‘you're not thinking of the events in the play in terms of reality, if a thing affects you like that’. Then, when the first production of the play failed, he put it down to Peter Wood directing Loot for laughs instead of ‘perfectly seriously’. Orton's advice to the Royal Court about staging The Ruffian on the Stair summed up his principle of contradiction: ‘The play is clearly not written naturalistically, but it must be directed and acted with absolute realism. No ‘stylization’, no ‘camp’. No attempt to match the author's extravagance of dialogue with extravagance of direction.’⁸

At the same time, Orton's view of life, as reflected in his diaries, is curiously myopic. Politics are dismissed as irrelevant, the only positive action being: ‘Reject all the values of society. And enjoy sex.’⁹ His own homosexuality and promiscuity is presented as a norm, universalized by his almost exclusive focus on relationships with other homosexuals. These run the whole social gamut, from Establishment figures, through the theatrical profession, to migrant labourers, in a record of frenetic sexual activity completely divorced from sentiment. Orton's one-sided selectivity implies that the (at the time banned) homosexual subculture equals the whole of society. When recording his one foreign holiday in his diary, he presents every male in Morocco as homosexual; and the only difference between Africa and England is stated to be that the law drives this ‘natural’ activity underground in Britain. By extension, heterosexual impulses, and indeed any feelings for others beyond physical lust, are either duplicity or self-deception. Respectability is hypocrisy. All moral principles are fraud. The logical result of such an egoistic view was Orton's brutal murder at the hands of his homosexual companion in 1967.

The premise of the diary form as literary genre (frequently misleading) is authenticity: an impression heightened in Orton's case by the sensationalism of his early death, and by the almost immediate publication of a biography (based in turn largely on Orton's diaries) which has recently been turned into a quasi-documentary film in 1987 (the film's title of Prick Up Your Ears being a typical double meaning that Orton had considered as a possible play-title). This process of canonization accurately reflects its subject's self-absorption, in which his own atypical personal experience is taken as universally representative.

In Orton's diaries, life is seen as validating art; and Orton's vision is directly reflected in his plays. His dramatic figures have no characteristics other than egoism, and all moral standards are inverted. Sexual deviation is seen as the norm, killing acceptable, and ‘a bang on the nose … human contact’. Any innocence is presented as stupidity, all authority revealed as the source of chaos; and egalitarian principles only mean that everyone is equally corrupt. The whole of society is ‘a madhouse. Unusual behaviour is the order of the day … It's democratic lunacy we practise’; and ‘All classes are criminal today. We live in an age of democracy’.¹⁰

This universality of the abnormal and dishonest, which Orton's dialogue proclaims, is affirmed by his characters at the end of each play. Yet there is always one innocent, who actually believes in the moral principles denied by the others, and who has to be disposed of in order to ‘keep up appearances’ (the typical closing line of Loot). In Entertaining Mr. Sloane the senile puritanical father is killed because he insists on informing the police that his children's love-object is a murderer. In Funeral Games, a distraught man searching for his vanished daughter, who lies buried under the coal in her husband's cellar, is hauled away to a lunatic asylum to avoid the discovery of a faked murder. The pattern is clearest in Loot. The murdered woman's husband—‘a law abiding citizen’ who likes ‘to be of assistance to authority’ and refuses to credit any ‘stories which bring officialdom into disrepute’¹¹—is arrested on a trumped up charge and carted off to prison where an ‘accidental’ death has been arranged for him, with the connivance of his son, to prevent him confessing to his priest about the crimes of the others.

Significantly, all these representatives of middle class moral standards are father figures, the conventional symbol of authority. Their removal, clearing the way for a celebration of a new (dis)order, projects the destruction of restrictive social norms that Orton hoped to achieve through his drama.

This wish-fulfilment is most obvious—and least convincing—in The Erpingham Camp (first staged as the second half of Crimes of Passion, 1967), where an isolated holiday camp/prison is presented as a microcosm of society. The immediate reference of the title is to the Butlin's Holiday Camps dotted around the coasts of England, the down-market equivalent to today's Club-Med, where working-class families had their vacation activities regimented by staff dressed in bright red jackets. It also plays off the term ‘camp,’ relating to over-the-top homosexual display.

In this play establishment complacency and repressive morality lead to a popular uprising, and total overthrow of the corrupt power structure. But the parody is so exaggerated that it reduces the revolution to fantasy. Erpingham, the megalomaniac and puritanical Director of this institution, dons the stock corset worn by overfed husbands of nineteenth-century French Farce beneath his white tie and formal tail-coat, topped off with a gardenia-buttonhole, in a parody of the classic scene from Brecht's Galileo (which has become almost a recurring cliché in more recent British drama). There the character of the liberal Cardinal changes as he is dressed in rigid traditionalism of papal robes—but here the clothing ceremony merely exaggerates Erpingham's cartoon-personality. He has named the camp after himself; and his symbolic status is made all-too explicit when he is hit by a bottle:

PADRE:
… (White-faced). You've struck a figure of authority!

As in Orton's other plays, the primary target is hypocrisy—blatantly represented by the clergyman's criminal seduction of teenage girls during ‘evangelical forays’. It infects the revolutionaries, with their slogan of ‘Have a bash, for the pregnant woman next door!’ (the riot having begun with a hysterical expectant-mother's face being slapped), as well as the authorities' declaration that: ‘We'll have a couple of verses of ‘Love Divine All Loves Excelling’, Padre. It's fire-hoses, tear-gas and the boot from then on’. But Erpingham's power is as hollow as his appearance. Faced with the outraged masses marching on his command centre, the only way of restoring order that he can think of is a farcical display of traditional moral values: organizing a pageant based on Raphael's painting of ‘Pope Leo turning back the Hordes of Attila’, with the girl-molesting Padre and a vulgarly promiscuous camp entertainer standing in for Holiness and Virginity. Not surprisingly this empty image of moral authority fails to halt the mob, and the camp is literally demolished.

The red glare of fire fills the room. Distant strains of ‘La Marseillaise’ are heard.

With revolutionary banners flying they stream through the mists of a bloody dawn!

There is a sound of wood and glass being smashed.¹²

However, there is no hint of political consciousness in the insurrection. All this rhetoric is deliberately inflated. The triumph of the masses is pure anarchy. The girl and the Padre are both raped, while Erpingham's ignominious death when the floor gives way beneath him brings the instant restoration of the status quo. Since these revolutionaries have no idea what type of society they want to put in his place, the brutal camp security guard (who has been manipulating the whole uprising) takes over.

What the Butler Saw (1969) gathers all these elements together. The social microcosm here is a psychiatric clinic, where madness is exploited rather than cured, following the epigraph from The Revenger's Tragedy: ‘Surely we're all mad people, and they / Whom we think are, are not’. Each of the characters becomes convinced that all the others are insane, despite their repeated assertions that ‘There's a perfectly rational explanation for what is taking place. Keep calm. All will be well.’¹³

(As another indication of continuity in the tradition of farce, one might note that the same source has been minded by Alan Ayckbourn, although instead of taking an epigraph from Tourneur's Jacobean tragedy, Ayckbourn transposes the whole theme into a modern context. But, like Orton, he casts the singular tragic action into the multiplying mould of Farce with his 1991 double play, The Revengers' Comedies.)

What the Butler Saw takes off from an amalgam of stock clichés: the casting couch; seduction disguised as medical examination; a wife's unexpected return. The rapid pace, proliferating parallels and multiple reversals, create an extravagant impression of absurdity, yet in itself, each incident is completely logical. A prospective typist takes off her clothes because the lascivious doctor, whom she wants to please as her future employer, persuades her that a physical examination is necessary for anyone who wants to work in a psychiatric institution (mens sana in corpore sano, etc.). When this ‘interview’ is interrupted, the doctor's natural response is to hide her discarded clothing. And when a government medical inspector mistakes her for a patient because she is naked, the doctor is forced to support this diagnosis in order to prevent his licence being removed. Her claim to be a secretary then becomes interpreted as a delusion that justifies her being certified as insane.

At first sight the insistence by the doctor's wife that he hire a hotel pageboy to fill the post, is eccentric in the extreme—until we learn that, having copulated with her in a hotel linen cupboard the previous evening, the page boy is blackmailing her into finding him employment. And his motive for making this unlikely demand (since the boy has no secretarial qualifications whatsoever) is quite rational. He needs a hiding-place, which the clinic will provide since—having gone on to seduce a party of school-girls later in the night—he is on the run from the police for sexually molesting minors. So, when a police sergeant comes in search of the secretary, to retrieve public property (part of a demolished civic statue that she picked up and put in her handbag), it is natural for the boy to put on a dress and wig belonging to the wife, and impersonate the girl, falling in with the doctor's last-ditch plan for covering up his own unethical behaviour in order to avoid arrest. Eluding her medical custodians, the maltreated secretary then seizes on the page's discarded livery as the only available clothing in which she can escape from the institute. When the boy discovers her dressed as him, he persuades the doctor that the solution for all their problems is to drug the Sergeant in order to remove his police uniform: the only way of getting out of the clinic being for the boy to masquerade as a policeman and take the fake page (as himself) into custody. The dress he has been wearing is then put on the Sergeant to preserve the ‘decencies’, and the Sergeant's unconscious body is hidden in the shrubbery.

This manic complexity is not only an essential part of Orton's humour. The effect of such an accelerating confusion of roles and identities discredits the logic behind it. Reason and madness merge. The doctor, who accurately protests that ‘I'm not mad. It only looks that way’, is forced to admit that any description of the external facts reverses all standards of normal and abnormal. The truth would only make things worse when the medical inspector comes on them disposing of the unconscious Sergeant, before the boy has had time to switch out of his female clothes. So he is introduced to the inspector as the doctor's wife since he is wearing her dress, while the supposed pageboy (the secretary) takes refuge in the doctor's embrace:

PRENTICE:
I'm not a pervert!
RANCE:
How would you describe a man who mauls young boys, importunes policemen and lives on terms of intimacy with a woman who shaves twice a day?
PRENTICE:
I'd say the man was a pervert.
RANCE:
I'm glad you're beginning to face the realities of the situation.(14)

Following this line, all the permutations of transvestism are milked for every possible sexual relationship—although, with the exception of the pageboy's offstage episode with Mrs. Prentice in the hotel, no sex actually occurs.

In this sense, as well as in the use of cliché and the hectic tempo of the action, as Orton pointed out, What the Butler Saw is ‘a conventional form’ of farce: ‘one should prove that one can do it, like Picasso proved that he could paint perfectly recognisable people in his early period’. Even the title is traditional, having been used as far back as 1905 (when a comedy titled ‘What the Butler Saw’ was presented at Wyndham's Theatre), and comes from the most well-known type of pier-end peepshow machine: one showing a keyhole, through which a French maid could be watched stripping to her suspender-belt while a gentleman sheds his pin-stripe trousers. The sexual display is literally that: exhibitionism. It is summed up in the notorious phallic image that concludes the play, where the vital missing part of Sir Winston Churchill's larger than life-size statue (dismembered by a terrorist bomb) is held aloft as an example of the national spirit—but one that even mangages to insult the veterans of the war against Hitler by reducing their motive for fighting to sublimated homosexual desire:

RANCE:
(With admiration) How much more inspiring if, in those dark days, we'd seen what we see now. Instead we had to be content with a cigar—the symbol falling far short, as we all realize, of the object itself.(15)

Offering symbolic surrogates for real sex is a fair definition of pornography; and in the dialogue Orton suggests that pornography not only caters to ‘depraved appetites’, but provides ‘an instrument for inciting decent citizens to commit bizarre crimes against humanity and the state’. As a description of the play's aims, this exemplifies the unresolved contradiction in Orton's attitude to both his audience and his use of immorality.

The attack on authority figures, ranging from the ‘National Hero’, Winston Churchill, to the Government Inspector, Rance, is more directly challenging. Rance's position as ‘a representative of order’ and ‘the forces of reason’ is undercut by making him the cause of the ‘chaos’ he condemns. The moral status of the Establishment is ridiculed by his interpretation of everything in terms of the most lurid case histories. Any exercise of power is discredited by his manic progress from issuing certificates of insanity, to pouncing with strait-jackets on everyone who comes his way, or shooting all those he considers dangerous lunatics (including the policeman). The ending is consciously Euripidean, with the bleeding Sergeant in leopard-spotted dress descending as a parodistic deus ex machina to liberate the exhausted and injured figures. Trapped in the security bars designed to prevent the lunatics from escaping (clearly representing the cage of morality that drives a conformist population demented by repressing sexuality), they follow him up a rope ladder ‘into the blazing light’.¹⁶

What this final tableau celebrates, as in Orton's previous plays, is anarchy. However, at the same time as rejecting all social restraints and conventions, Orton claims traditional justification for the sexual explicitness of his work and its flouting of taboos: ‘farce originally was very close to tragedy, and differed only in the treatment of its themes—themes like rape, bastardy, prostitution’.¹⁷ The ending of What the Butler Saw is an exact rendering of this mixture.

The ironic image of redeemed humanity ascending into a saner heaven—though actually the oppressively moral world of reality that they have been temporarily liberated from by the farce—from the madhouse of furtive sex (defined solely as rape, blackmail or gender-bending perversion), derives from the apotheosis that crowns classical Greek tragedy. And Orton combines this with the waving of a monstrously Aristophanic phallus. Similarly, the joyful recognition scene, which immediately precedes this coda and resolves the conflicts of the plot, would be a tragic outcome in conventional moral terms. The discovery of long-lost children is the ultimate disaster (although in the play presented as the opposite), since the revelation that the pageboy and the secretary are Mrs. Prentice's illegitimate twins, fathered during a wartime blackout in the same hotel linen cupboard by the man she eventually married, is simultaneously an exposure of ‘Double incest’.¹⁸ Typically too, following through Orton's concept of traditional farce, the comic affirmation of this outcome is designed as the ultimate outrage to a middle class audience's standards.

Orton's work is also traditional in another sense. He linked his style to Sheridan, Congreve and, in particular, Oscar Wilde. In Wilde's fate he saw his own experience of being a homosexual, an outsider, and imprisonment (Orton had been given a short sentence for defacing books from a public library); and there are clear echoes of Lady Bracknell in exchanges like

PRENTICE:
It's fascinating theory … Does it tie in with known facts?
RANCE:
That need not cause us undue anxiety. Civilizations have been founded and maintained on theories which refused to obey facts.

His most effective lines echo the paradoxes of Wilde and Shaw in the use of inversion to capture unacknowledged truths, as with ‘Love thy neighbour … The man who said that was crucified by his’.¹⁹ The epigraph to Loot is taken from Shaw, while in addition to borrowing the situation of the missing dress from Ben Travers, the recognition scene of What the Butler Saw is lifted directly from the discovery at the end of The Importance of Being Earnest—although Orton travesties the Wildean resolution through exaggeration.

Indeed, the degree to which Orton was consciously extending the comic tradition becomes increasingly clear within his work. As the self-referential comments on symbolism and pornography indicate, What the Butler Saw parodies itself, and it does so through the pastiche of other plays. To underline the point, attention is drawn to the set as a typical artefact of farce: ‘Why are there so many doors. Was the house designed by a lunatic?’; and the action is continually presented as a literary cliché: ‘Isn't that a little melodramatic, doctor? … Lunatics are melodramatic. The subtleties of drama are wasted on them’; or ‘We're approaching what our racier novelists term “the climax”’.²⁰

Orton was equally sensitive to contemporary influences. His first play borrowed heavily from Harold Pinter, with its threatening stranger forcing his way into a woman's home (as in The Room, 1957) and question-and-answer interrogation (as in The Birthday Party, 1958). But the subliminal violence in Pinter's early comedy of menace is extended into on-stage murder, while Orton always supplies logical explanations for the Pinteresque elements of indefinable personality and reversal, in which the ‘ruffian’ becomes the victim. If Joyce is called Madeleine—or Sarah—in Ruffian on the Stair (1964, staged 1967), it is because these were her trade-names as a prostitute. A stranger's completely motiveless assault on her and attempted rape turn out to be the result of her husband Mike's activities. As an Irish hit-man, his meeting at King's Cross Station, mentioned in the opening lines, was conspiratorial (not simply lavatorial). It led to the killing of the stranger's brother/lover, whom he cannot live without—and since the stranger's religious principles forbid suicide (though not homosexual incest), his attack on her is designed to manipulate her husband into shooting him. In Orton, menace only seems arbitrary until the facts are revealed. This conjunction of absurd action with rationality, which is basic to all farce, distinguishes his approach from Pinter's; and the extent of the difference can be seen in the moralistic subtext underlying Orton's work.

Paradoxically, considering their strongly anti-moral stance, on one level Orton's farces are morality plays. For instance, Funeral Games and The Erpingham Camp both deal explicitly with cardinal moral qualities. The first was originally commissioned, as an ironic expose of Faith and Justice, for a television series on the ‘Seven Deadly Virtues’ (a title that indicates Shaw's continuing influence on the English dramatic scene, since it comes from the Don Juan in Hell scene of Man and Superman). The second was written for a companion ‘Seven Deadly Sins’ series, to illustrate Pride. In Orton's world, ethical principles are merely counterfeit, propaganda lies propping up an immoral society.

Where his plays are most effective is in challenging all the ways society categorizes individuals, particularly in terms of gender and sexual orientation. Moral attitudes—and in Loot or The Erpingham Camp the religion on which morality is based—are not only assaulted through the subjects he chose to dramatize, but undermined by the complexities and confusions of Farce that make the audience (as bourgeois representatives) accompliches through humour. At the same time, the fantasy elements in his work devalue its social criticism, making a negative statement even out of the imperative to attack the society that victimized him as a homosexual. Indeed, in carrying his principle of inversion to its extreme the morality—for which society apparently stands indicted in his plays—always turns out to be positive and applauded. Orton's brand of Farce is not so much subversive, as a declaration of war. It embodies the anarchy it celebrates.

Notes

1. Orton, Complete Plays, London, 1976, p. 215.

2. Orton, in Plays and Players, November 1978, p. 13.

3. Complete Plays, p. 32.

4. Ibid., p. 209; The Orton Diaries, London, 1986, p. 125.

5. Letters published in The Daily Telegraph, reprinted in The Orton Diaries, p. 281.

6. The Orton Diaries, pp. 256, 54.

7. Complete Plays, pp. 74, 317-18, 373.

8. The Orton Diaries, pp. 232, 211, 47; Orton, 1967 letter, cited by John Lahr in the introduction to Complete Plays, p. 20.

9. The Orton Diaries, p. 251.

10. Complete Plays, pp. 329, 412, 333.

11. Ibid., pp. 274, 216-17.

12. Ibid., pp. 303, 292, 310, 314 & 315.

13. Ibid., p. 383.

14. Ibid., pp. 418 and 417.

15. Complete Plays, pp. 447, 427-28. Ignoring the fact that farce is primarily a visual medium, critical analysis of Orton's work tends to follow John Lahr in emphasizing its literary quality, picking up on the assertion in his novel (Head to Toe, London, 1971, pp. 148-9) that ‘words were more effective than actions; in the right hands verbs and nouns could create panic’. (see Lahr, Introduction to Orton's Complete Plays, pp. 8-10). However true this may be of the novel, as in the closing sections of What the Butler Saw, it is the visual imagery that dominates Orton's plays.

16. The Orton Diaries, p. 242; Complete Plays, pp. 417 & 438, 448.

17. Orton in Plays and Players, November 1978, p. 13.

18. Complete Plays, p. 446.

19. Ibid., pp. 383, 340.

20. Ibid., pp. 376, 427 & 447.