[In the following review of Between Us Girls, Fred and Madge, and The Visitors, O'Connor offers a mostly favorable assessment of all three works.]

Joe Orton kept pages of notes—words or phrases, sometimes scraps of dialogue. As he used them in his plays or stories, he would cross them off. This collage mentality pervades all his work and produces the effect of surrealism that he strove for, though it can induce irritation in the reader. Orton's is the voice from the back of the hall, at first asking pertinent questions and cracking amusing jokes. By the end of the evening, one feels like telling him to shut up.

Between Us Girls was Orton's first completed work after he had ceased to collaborate with Kenneth Halliwell, his partner and eventual murderer. Written in 1957, it is a heavy-handed spoof of romantic women's magazine stories, substituting a lurid plot involving strip-clubs, slave-traders and a Hollywood happy ending for the boy-meets-girl formula. In her introduction to this first publication, Francesca Coppa identifies references to the 1952 film Singin' in the Rain, and students of 1950s pulp fiction will no doubt be able to find the sources for some of the other characters and settings. For example, the narrator, Susan Hope, is an aspiring actress who takes a job in the “Rainier Revuebar”. Orton's earlier novels, now lost, written in tandem with Halliwell, had drawn heavily on Ronald Firbank, and although Orton is here freeing himself from the convoluted prose they had previously attempted, one still hears the Firbankian model in the choice of names. When Susan looks at a poster for the club, its star is “Düsseldorf's own Countess Sirie von Blumen-ghast”. Orton's self-conscious elocution and his search for an artistic milieu away from his drab Leicester background give Susan's prissy manners in the face of Soho and then Mexican sex-work a tingling reality. When she is dressed as a novice for her first evening in the brothel, she comments: “Señora Josefa had dressed me in something which I am not going to mention. She insisted upon my virginal quality and what I wore and the furniture in my room bordered on sacrilege.”

A running joke throughout Between Us Girls concerns Susan's copy of a novel about Madame Pompadour called The Divine Marquisé, the error of the acute accent never explained or noted. Nancy Mitford's Madame de Pompadour had been a bestseller in 1954 and must have come to the attention of Orton and Halliwell on their frequent visits to the public library. Some future student might like to take the two books and analyse Mitford's influence on Orton; it's certainly there, especially in a dream described by Susan near the end of the story, when she marries the surly and violent hero. He is Bob Kennedy, and this is the first appearance in Orton's work of the angry, attractive character who would become most famous as Mr. Sloane. Susan sees him again: “He'd grown older and wiser and tougher and more, not less intolerant.”

Fred and Madge and The Visitors were written in 1959 and 1961 and are more recognizably Ortonesque. Like Between Us Girls, Fred and Madge takes a hackneyed set of characters and sets them on a fantasy ride ending in India. In one brilliant scene, two professional “insulters” vie with each other to abuse the guests at a wedding ceremony. “We must hurt the feelings of our enemies, infuriate those we dislike”, declares one of these two professors of Insult, who offer scholarships in “tactlessness, incivility, ill-breeding, blackguardism and back-biting”. Fred and Madge themselves have spent their working lives in Lewis Carroll-like occupations, he rolling boulders up a slope, she straining water through sieves. The Visitors is set in a hospital ward and introduces Orton's favourite villainness, the nurse. This figure of authority, who reappears to more sinister effect in Loot, as the woman who “has practised her own form of genocide for decades”, will, at the end of What the Butler Saw, be abused and tied up in a straitjacket.

As early runs of Orton's later work, both these plays are full of interesting similarities and pree-choes. How they would fare on stage would depend on a director finding a style which would disguise Orton's own pleasure at finding a place for each of his one-liners. In Fred and Madge, he mocks Noël Coward for being “an almost perfect example of the unnatural idiot”, and he parodies Private Lives in a chance-meeting scene. The problem with playing Orton is exactly the same as that of getting Coward right. People try far too hard to be Ortonesque, whereas what is really needed is the absolute professionalism and realism which he sets out to lampoon.