[In the following review, Keates comments on a posthumous novel, Between Us Girls, and two posthumous plays, Fred and Madge and The Visitors.]

What would have become of John Kingsley Orton if his lover Kenneth Halliwell had not chosen, on 9 August 1967 at 25 Noel Road, Islington, to beat out his brains with a hammer before committing suicide? In a sense the act was, in Cavafy's famous phrase about the barbarians, ‘a kind of solution’, not only, for obvious reasons, to Halliwell's problems with Orton's talent and success, but to certain of those unspoken yearnings through which a particular era battens on to those whose talents sculpt its profile. The murder, coming so soon after the decriminalisation of homosexuality, destroyed forever the illusion of that apparently innocent arrangement of ‘two gentlemen sharing’ with which cohabiting males had generally managed to circumvent the law, ironically adding fuel to Orton's complaint in his diary that ‘the whole trouble with Western society today is the lack of anything worth concealing’.

Halliwell's hammer blows transformed his victim, what was more, into an icon of blighted promise, a sort of ‘Chatterton, that marvellous boy’, for the Sixties, which, as a British cultural moment, never properly happened until the decade was halfway over. Whereas Orton living might have degenerated into a mere lovable gadfly, the elfin pet of those whose tails he liked to tweak, we could turn him, dead, into an indispensable component of the zeitgeist, on the basis of three or four plays which essentially rejected the era's more portentous invocations of realism in art.

Orton had no wish to romanticise the dreariness of his working-class background in a suburb of Leicester. Not surprisingly, all three of the early works now released, the novel Between Us Girls, completed in 1957, and the plays Fred & Madge and The Visitors, written during the ensuing four years, are blatant rejections of that species of naturalism, tinged with inevitable nostalgia, explored by dramatists, novelists and film-makers in the wake of Look Back in Anger and Room at the Top. Not for Orton the idea of exploiting, in the name of a notional integrity, the provincial dullness he had dedicated his adolescence to escaping. Each of these juvenilia constitutes instead a calculated revolt against that very same ‘poverty of expectation’ that Ernest Bevin had famously identified as the doom, and in some sense also the fault, of the British proletariat.

Thus the world of Between Us Girls seems almost laboriously removed from anything with which its creator, even after his flight from Leicester, could possibly have been familiar. Orton here purposely disobeys that injunction frequently and misleadingly given to fledgling authors, ‘Write about what you know.’ Sophistications, even of the borrowed kind, had arrived with Kenneth Halliwell, whom he met as a Rada student in 1951. The pair had since written a series of novels with titles such as Lord Cucumber and The Mechanical Womb, and including no less than three versions of The Boy Hairdresser, all of which had been rejected by publishers nervous of their queerness during a period when the unholy alliance of tabloid newspapers and authoritarian home secretaries was making its last stand against the legions of Sodom. As Orton's earliest solo venture, Between Us Girls was a malign augury for Halliwell of his protégé's dawning independence.

The book's plot is of the flimsiest. Susan Hope, actress wannabe, joins the chorus line at the Rainier Revuebar—‘Intimate—Sexiting—Non-stop’—featuring Countess Sirie von Blumenghast (‘18 sensational poses never displayed before’). Whisked off to a dodgy engagement in Panama, Les Girls fetch up as white slaves in Madame Josefa's luxury bordello, before Susan escapes to Hollywood to become the star of a musical version of the novel about Madame de Pompadour she has been reading as the story opens.

Of the two plays, The Visitors seems the more coherent in its portrayal of the fusspot Mrs. Platt attempting to rally her dying father Mr. Kemp with a diet of breezy bedside cliché. The tables are turned, however, as she falls under a bus and Kemp, in rapid remission, eagerly assumes her former role. Fred & Madge, on the other hand, a comedy of emancipation—by means of fantasies made real—from the tedium of working-class middle age, seeks to be everything at once, absurdist à la N. F. Simpson, with touches of Pinteresque minimalism, Firbank, Coward and Pirandello.

How would we have guessed that any of these was the work of Joe Orton? Between Us Girls, in its lack of momentum and curious flatness of tone, makes us thankful that he forsook fiction for drama, and its atmosphere of camp cinema glitz is no more typical of the writer than its generally unremarkable passages of dialogue. The plays on the other hand are as idiosyncratically Ortonian as we could hope for. Though Fred & Madge seems too crudely parodic of its characters' lives, and though the ending, a riotous fantasy in which the cast, having formally announced its intentions to the audience, sets off for India, looks like theatrical suicide, The Visitors, for all its structural flaws, is a resonant forerunner of Loot or Entertaining Mr. Sloane in speeches such as:

She was very well known at the time. She had a voice that could break wine-glasses. That's what they said. I often wondered if it was true. I would have asked her, but I didn't like to. Not that she would have minded. She wasn't that type. But it seemed too personal, so I didn't.

Respectfully archaeological though these publications appear, this play at least deserves a theatrical outing.