[In the following essay, Walcot discusses the “Greek” character of both Orton's work and his relationship with Kenneth Halliwell.]

I always say to myself that the theatre is the Temple of Dionysus, and not Apollo. You do the Dionysus thing on your typewriter, and then you allow a little Apollo in, just a little to shape and guide it along certain lines you may want to go along. But you can't allow Apollo in completely.¹

The British press loves to regale its readers with lurid details of the latest sex scandal. Sex spiced with a dash of violence provides even better copy. You can imagine what a field-day the press enjoyed early in August 1967 when it reported the murder of Joe Orton by Kenneth Halliwell. Jaded palates could be titillated while, at the same time, moral indignation was triumphantly proclaimed. This was one of those rare stories which had everything: a jailbird who had achieved notoriety as the author of plays disfigured by unmitigated filth and perversity—homosexuality, fetishism, incest, rape, transvestism, nymphomania, sadism, you name it, it was all there in Orton's so-called comedies—this graduate of Her Majesty's Prison Eastchurch, Sheerness, Kent, had been bludgeoned to death in a frenzy of violence by a lover who had proceeded to compound his crime by taking an overdose of drugs. ‘A fitting end’, ‘just retribution’ was the popular verdict, and this condemnation will come as no surprise when you consider what had happened when the victim's Loot was presented at Bournemouth, a seaside resort in southern England distinguished, as Kemp remarks in Loot, by its palms but similar to Miami only inasmuch as the middle-class favor it as a retirement home: ‘Bournemouth Old Ladies Shocked’ shrieked a headline in the ever sedate Times;² and then there were the letters which seemed to flow unceasingly from the pen of a certain Mrs. Edna Welthorpe, such as the epistle from this champion of common decency in which she informed the readers of the Daily Telegraph, our stuffiest newspaper, of the nausea which she had experienced at the endless parade of mental and physical perversion offered by Entertaining Mr. Sloane.³ And if someone points out that Edna Welthorpe was simply a nom-de-plume exploited by a mischievous Orton, well, this sick joke just confirms its perpetrator's total depravity. Was nothing, even little old ladies, one of whom might be brave enough to protest to the press, was nothing sacred to Joe Orton? Apparently not.

When, in the second act of Loot, Fay confesses to the murder of Mrs. McLeavy, that renowned detective, ‘Truscott of the Yard’, compliments her on her simple and direct style: ‘It's a theme’, he says, ‘which less skilfully handled could've given offence’, and that would be my own assessment of Orton's work. As for the story of the deaths of Orton and Halliwell, that I personally find infinitely more sad than sordid, but perhaps I am prejudiced, not, I trust, because my standards of morality are corrupt, but because the relationship between the older Halliwell and a Joe Orton always desperate to learn from his seemingly much better educated lover appears to me to have been very Greek in character.

Certainly it is my belief that their relationship can be demonstrated to have had for the lovers a peculiarly Greek quality. Halliwell must have known about Greek homosexuality and must have had some understanding, however uncritical, of what the Greeks of antiquity expected from love between two males. This claim may be advanced since, in the last phase of his education at Wirral Grammar School, Halliwell was a member of a British ‘institution’ now virtually defunct, the classical sixth-form, and he took Latin, Greek and Ancient History at his Higher School Certificate examination.⁴ The following joke appears in a file of material for possible use kept by Orton:

Greek paederasty was a noble ideal. I hope one day to see it practised in this country alongside the Christian virtues of Love Thy Neighbour and turn the other cheek.⁵

Not the best of Orton's jokes perhaps, though the last four words do carry a punch. I quote it, however, not so much as an example of Ortonesque humor but in order to substantiate my statement that Orton and Halliwell knew about Greek homosexuality, and knew about it as it was presented by an older generation of scholars whose antiseptic approach is indicated by the choice of the term ‘pederasty’.⁶ Orton's biographer, John Lahr, was being, I suspect, more perspicacious than he probably appreciated when he wrote of Halliwell having played midwife to his friend's talent, for such a remark recalls the person of Socrates, himself the son of a midwife, and the philosopher's assertion that he practised the same skill as his mother in the sense that he assisted at the birth of others' thoughts: ‘Those who seek my company’, Socrates is recorded as saying, ‘have the same experience as a woman with child; they suffer the pains of labor and, by night and day, are full of distress far greater than a woman's and my art has power to bring on these pangs or to allay them’⁷ A comparison of Halliwell and Socrates may be absurd to some but it might well have been much less absurd to Halliwell himself, and Orton, I am convinced, could have cheerfully seen himself performing the part of that most maverick of Socrates' followers, the irrepressible Alcibiades. Indeed I have often imagined a scene set in that stifling room in which the pair of them spent so much of their lives together where Halliwell and Orton are reading a translation of Alcibiades' speech from Plato's Symposium although a little uncomfortable because of Alcibiades' unflattering description of his teacher's physical appearance, the prematurely bald Halliwell will be responding with delight to the rest, including the sexual badinage.⁸

The relationship between Halliwell and Orton was much more than a sexual relationship. To put it crudely, it was a marriage of two minds, and it is clear from entries in his diary that Orton retained to an intensely bitter end a respect for his lover's intellectual prowess that outsiders failed to comprehend.⁹ Orton continued to exhibit the naivété of the self-educated and to betray a remarkable deference when exposed to yet another display of the wisdom affected by Halliwell. I am very struck by an entry in Orton's diary dated the 26th March, 1967, a period of time when one might expect the myth of Halliwell's omniscience to have been completely shattered for Orton:

… Kenneth, who read the Observer, tells me of the latest wayout group in America—complete sexual licence. ‘It's the only way to smash the wretched civilization,’ I said, making a mental note to hot-up What The Butler Saw when I came to re-write.

‘It's like the Albigensian heresy in the 11th Century,’ Kenneth said. Looked up the article in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Most interesting. Yes. Sex is the only way to infuriate them. Much more fucking and they'll be screaming hysterics in next to no time.¹⁰

What strikes me here is not so much Halliwell's parallel, clever though it may be, but the reaction of Orton, who goes scurrying off to the Encyclopedia Britannica so that he may expand on the tidbit of knowledge vouchsafed him by his guru. Such an episode not only defines their relationship but also their respective roles in that relationship. Both, it seems to me, are very Greek.

Let me explain. Halliwell, of course, was no scholar but would have known what we may call orthodox if somewhat old-fashioned views about the Greeks, particularly in those areas of a special interest to him. The standard book on education in the ancient world was first published in 1956, though my own copy is dated 1977. It includes a chapter headed ‘Pederasty in Classical Education’ and its author, the French scholar H. I. Marrou, states that,

“Greek love” was to provide classical education with its material conditions and its method. For the men of ancient times this type of love was essentially educative. … For the Greeks, education meant, essentially, a profound and intimate relationship, a personal union between a young man and an elder who was at once his model, his guide and his initiator—a relationship on to which the fire of passion threw warm and turbid reflections. … Throughout Greek history the relationship between master and pupil was to remain that between a lover and his beloved: education remained in principle not so much a form of teaching, an instruction in techniques, as an expenditure of loving effort by an elder concerned to promote the growth of a younger man who was burning with the desire to respond to this love and show himself worthy of it.¹¹

Marrou's language is extravagant and he depends too heavily on the evidence of philosophical texts, but he does present the popular appraisal of Greek homosexuality and its educative function: in other words, this was the picture likely to be familiar to Halliwell and it was a picture of undoubted attraction to a person of Halliwell's circumstances and proclivities. ‘In Orton’, Lahr comments, ‘Halliwell sensed a perfect companion. He used to stroke Orton's sleek head in front of Griffin [a RADA student who also shared in Halliwell's apartment] and call him “my pussy-cat”. Halliwell played the man of the world, and Orton was impressed. Halliwell tried to mould Orton into the Ideal Friend. “Halliwell was like a Svengali to John,” recalls Griffin. “He took John over. It was as if he were playing God.”’¹²

As their affair developed Halliwell and Orton came to share with the Greeks of antiquity a bleak philosophy of life. In Homer's Iliad Achilles tells Priam that Zeus has two jars, one of disasters and the other full of blessings, and from these the god allots man's fate; but whereas we would allow for three possibilities, all from the good jar, all from the bad jar or a mixture from each jar, Achilles will admit just two, a mixture of good and bad fortune or unrelieved calamity.¹³ Nobody, the Greeks believed, was entitled to live a life of unalloyed happiness, and nobody is to be accounted happy until he is dead or so Herodotus' Solon informed King Croesus of Lydia and the subsequent life of that monarch proved the validity of his guest's opinion.¹⁴ ‘Christ!’, McCorquodale prays in a line from Funeral Games deleted from the final version, ‘let me die tonight. Don't tease me. I've laughed long enough.’¹⁵ Man is the sport of fortune, Solon says; God laughs and snaps his fingers, is the Halliwell and Orton equivalent.¹⁶ Any excess of happiness arouses the jealousy of the Greek gods and a price has to be paid. The deaths of Halliwell and Orton were preceded by their holiday in Tangier, and it was this holiday which prompted the following entry in Orton's diary:

Kenneth and I sat talking of how happy we both felt. We'd have to pay for it. Or we'd be struck down from afar by disaster because we were, perhaps, too happy. To be young, goodlooking, healthy, famous, comparatively rich and happy is surely going against nature. … ‘Crimes of Passion will be a disaster,’ Kenneth said. ‘That will be the scapegoat. We must sacrifice Crimes of Passion in order that we may be spared disaster more intolerable.’ I slept all night soundly and woke up at seven feeling as though the whole of creation was conspiring to make me happy. I hope no doom strikes.¹⁷

The language as well as the sentiment of the entry is Greek through and through. Several years before, the rejection of a novel elicited the following observations from Halliwell:

Personally, I am convinced that ‘what you lose on the swings, you gain on the roundabouts’ and vice versa. So it would, quite frankly, not be in the logic of things for John and I to have much success in any sphere. We live much too comfortably and pleasantly in our peculiar little way.¹⁸

My two quotations, one from Orton and one from Halliwell, stand in stark contrast, one regretting the potential loss of happiness and the second settling for a limited happiness in preference to success. The possible failure of Crimes of Passion was not an ultimate disaster for Kenneth Halliwell, but then Halliwell found their cramped apartment a refuge rather than a straitjacket and success a sacrificial offering. Clearly, the relationship between Halliwell, the lover or erastes, and Orton, the loved one or eromenos, changed as Orton became a celebrity, though in June 1964, at the opening night in the West End of Entertaining Mr. Sloane, Halliwell when asked where he went out with Orton could jokingly, if also somewhat bitterly, answer that he didn't go our with Orton, he went in!¹⁹ By the time of the holiday in Tangier Orton was sneering at Halliwell for just wanting to be masturbated, whereas he was ‘virile” in fucking boys.²⁰ The eromenos had become an erastes himself, a development accepted as natural and so inevitable by the Greeks but not by that student of antiquity, Kenneth Halliwell.

Orton was ripe to be instructed by a lover who fancied himself as a classical scholar. Among the books he cherished in his youth, we are told,²¹ was Thomas Bulfinch's Greek Mythology. Bulfinch's collections of fable are still popular today with the tiro, though well over a century old. The assessment of a professional, however, will be far less charitable: thus John Peradotto describes Bulfinch as ‘this mid-Victorian mythological McGuffey, modelled on Ovid's Metamorphoses, but Ovid moralisé, dutifully expurgated, and written in a style not likely to set their young pulses thumping … It tests the imagination to realize that not five years separate the publication of The Age of fable from Moby Dick.’²² Orton's sister Leonie was read Greek mythology by her brother, while a friend from Orton's days in repertory theater speaks of being taken by surprise at the twenty-year old's knowledge of Greek gods and goddesses.²³ Under Halliwell's tutelage Orton's knowledge and interests became more refined, so much so in fact that in 1967 he made the following statement in an interview:

I'm very conscious of what's come before. I like Lucian and the classical writers, and I suppose that's what gives my writing a difference, an old-fashioned classical education! Which I never received, but I gave myself one, reading them all in English, for I have so little Latin and less Greek.²⁴

As usual with an Orton interview, the tone is mocking and Orton has his tongue firmly anchored in his cheek. Casual references reveal that Orton the man, presumably while closeted with Halliwell, read translations of dramatists such as Aristophanes and Euripides, while in a BBC interview Orton boasted an acquaintance with Sophocles. It is not my wish to belittle Orton, but I am not inclined to accept everything that he said in an interview for public consumption without collaborative evidence. I also have considerable doubts about the veracity of some of the sexual adventures recorded in his diaries. While I agree with Joyce in The Ruffian on the Stair that public lavatories are interesting places, my limited experience suggests that they are not quite the haunt of those whom society regards as misfits which Orton's diaries imply.²⁵

I would justify my scepticism by quoting a reply given by Orton to an interviewer who asked him about his likes and dislikes:

Well, I hate all animals with tails and my favourite play is the Andromeda of Euripides. I was born in Leicester 25 years ago. My father was a gardener and my mother a machinist—both are still alive and working. I failed my eleven-plus, and went to a secondary modern: after that I was sacked from various jobs for incompetence, and ended up with a two-year scholarship at RADA. Then I worked in rep for four months, but haven't been on the stage since. During the next few years I was married, divorced, operated on for acute appendicitis, photographed in the nude and arrested for larceny. Then came a six-month spell in prison.²⁶

This reply contains some blatant lies: Orton was well over thirty at the time of the interview and had never been married and divorced. His reference to the Andromeda of Euripides is equally misleading, for though this was one of Euripides' most celebrated tragedies, it has not survived and so could not have been read by Orton. Why then did he claim the Andromeda as his favourite play? Was it a slip of the tongue, a mistake for a play with a similar name, say the Alcestis? There is a further possibility but one which might well be thought more clever than compelling and that I shall defer for the moment. All in all, it is difficult to resist the conclusion that Orton mentioned the Andromeda to create an impression, and that this is another lie and not a very good lie at that.

But scepticism is not the same as total disbelief, and we should return to Orton's reputed acquaintance with Sophocles. Is this supported by evidence? The knowledge of Sophocles was claimed in an interview when Orton discussed the genesis of Entertaining Mr. Sloane:

I originally started with the Oedipus legend as a basis and threw it out halfway through. It gave me the germ to start from. I got Eddie the brother and father relationship from Oedipus at Colonnus—the old man won't speak to his son at all.²⁷

In Entertaining Mr. Sloane Kemp tells Sloane that he has not been on speaking terms with his son for twenty years, and Ed finds it incredible that Kemp will not speak to his only son and feels his father to be without human feelings. The Oedipus at Colonnus features a crucial scene between the son Polyneices and the exiled Oedipus, who will not converse with his offspring until subjected to strong pressure from his dear friend Theseus and his devoted daughter Antigone. Without the pressure from Theseus, Oedipus declares, his son would never have heard his voice.²⁸ The scene ends as Oedipus dismisses his son with curses ringing in his ears. The decrepit Kemp comes on stage early in Act Two of Sloane [Entertaining Mr. Sloane] carrying a stick and tapping his way to the sideboard much in the fashion of Sophocles' blind Oedipus, while Kath displays a solicitude for the Dadda which parallels Antigone's concern for her own aged parent. Both Polyneices and Ed have horrified their fathers, the former by exposing Oedipus to exile and penury and the latter—and this, of course, is pure Orton—by having been caught by Kemp ‘committing some kind of felony in the bedroom’; both need their fathers, Polyneices so that he may defeat his brother Eteocles and Ed so that some papers may be signed. Polyneices approaches his father in the guise of a suppliant,²⁹ while in Act Two of Sloane when Kemp does speak to Ed in order to tell him of Sloane's threatening behavior, the roles are reversed as Kemp falls towards the ground and Oedipus' dire curses directed against his son become these words spoken to his father by Ed:

Dad … What's come over you? Don't kneel to me. I forgive you. I'm the one to kneel. Pat me on the head. Pronounce a blessing. Forgive and forget, eh? I'm sorry and so are you.

Ed has a liking for the part of priest and confessor, a facet of his character a penitent Sloane is later to exploit to his advantage, and certainly in one sense, Sloane qualifies as Kath's long lost son and thereby stands in a special relationship to her brother Ed. Both plays, in other words, are about the relationship between parents and offspring, in Sophocles the relationship between Oedipus and Polyneices and Oedipus and Antigone, and in Orton the relationship between Kemp and Ed and Kemp and Kath and, I myself would add, between Sloane and both Kath and Ed. One final point: Polyneices and his brother Eteocles attempt to share the throne of Thebes on an equitable basis but fail—are we to see any link with the sharing of Sloane by Kath and Ed and if so, does the Sophoclean parallel suggest an equally unhappy outcome to the arrangement, irrespective of Ed's experience at the conference table?

A first glance, and even a second or third glance for that matter, hardly suggests any connection between the classic Oedipus myth—the murder of Laius by his son Oedipus and Oedipus' subsequent marriage to his mother and self-blinding when his parricide and incest are revealed—and Orton's Entertaining Mr. Sloane, unless we link together the fact that both Oedipus and Sloane are the perpetrators of unsolved killings or compare Kemp with Laius as a murdered father and perhaps with Sophocles' herdsman also, since the herdsman alone knows exactly what happened when a murder took place. Otherwise we may note in general that the setting of Sloane is austere, being restricted to a single room, and that the action is similarly limited, being confined to some sexual groping and the attack on Kemp, much of which is mercifully concealed behind a settee. This, coupled with the messenger type speech in which Sloane relates how he came to kill the photographer, is reminiscent of the technique of the Greek dramatists, but none of it really adds up to very much. The picture changes, however, if we consider Orton's further account of how he used the Oedipus material he knew from Sophocles, and then examine what another modern playwright has to say about his own use of comparable material. This is how Orton continued his BBC interview:

There's no significance in the fact that I used the two Oedipuses at all, apart from the fact that it just gave me an idea and dramatists always need a plot. It doesn't really matter what you use as a plot on which to hang your dialogue and your ideas, but you must, I think, have a plot.

No one would guess that Entertaining Mr. Sloane owes anything to Sophocles, if it had not been for Orton's own acknowledgement of his indebtedness, just as no one would guess that The Cocktail Party owes anything to the Alcestis of Euripides, if we had not been told by its author, T. S. Eliot.³⁰ In a letter to Viscount Samuel Eliot again made the point that he had himself to inform others that Euripides was a source of inspiration for The Cocktail Party. In the same letter Eliot compared his use of Greek material with that made by the French dramatists Cocteau, Giraudoux, Anouilh and Sartre, stating that their method was in some ways diametrically the opposite of his own:

They have retained the names of the original characters and stuck rather more closely to the plots of the original dramatists, the innovation being merely that the characters talk as if they were contemporary French people, and in some cases employ what one might call anachronistic allusions to modern life. The method that has appealed to me has been rather to take merely the situation of a Greek play as a starting-point, with wholly modern characters, and develop it according to the workings of my own mind.³¹

These two explanations of their method of employing Greek material, by Orton and by Eliot, sound, I would suggest, remarkably alike: what both dramatists took from the Greeks was a story-line, a basic plot, and on this they grafted ideas purely their own. Any attempt to set side by side Sophocles' Oedipus plays and Entertaining Mr. Sloane must allow for such an approach to, and such a use of, material derived from fifth-century Athenian drama.

It was Euripides and his last tragedy, the Bacchae, that Orton attempted to reproduce in The Erpingham Camp. Critics have not always been well disposed to this play, and the fact that Orton claimed it as his version of the Bacchae has simply given some yet another stick with which to beat its author. Not untypical is the assessment of Martin Esslin:

The transposition of the plot into a British holiday camp—a favourite target of topical satire at the time—yields neither a contemporary reinterpretation of the theme of The Bacchae nor illuminating variations on its meaning: it merely lowers its social level and trivializes the plot. While Euripides deals with profound tensions in human nature, Orton is merely describing the inmates of a holiday camp getting out of hand through the incompetence of an entertainment's manager who is too inexperienced or clumsy to control the evening's floor show. Thus the Dionysus of the play, Chief Redcoat Riley, is no God, no personification of primeval forces, while its Pentheus, Erpingham, is no more than a slightly authoritarian lay-figure, given to mouthing an occasional patriotic cliché. Even in terms of mere parody the parallels are extremely feebly drawn: the raging maenads amount to hardly more than a pregnant lady, who claims that she has been insulted, and her feebly protesting husband. And Erpingham dies not under any assault by orgiastic, unchained revellers, but merely because the floorboards of his office give way so that he drops down among the dancers on the ballroom floor.³²

For Esslin the play is ‘hardly more than an extended, a rather feeble, cabaret sketch’, a judgement which I find harsh to the point of being grossly unfair. At this stage I shall simply observe that the ‘feebly protesting husband’ goes around, according to the stage direction, ‘viciously beating up’ his victims and the ‘pregnant lady’ tells a fellow camper to get out before she kicks her dental plate to pieces—delicacy prevents me from repeating what she has to say to the camper's husband since it begins, ‘Piss off …’

I would agree that there are problems which make it difficult for The Erpingham Camp to be evaluated fairly. Like so much of Orton it is very much a product of a particular decade, the sixties, and of an intensely British environment. It is set in a holiday camp of a type known only to the British and the British working class family before the advent of affluence carried all but the very poorest winging their way south to the beaches of Spain and, more recently, Florida and Miami.³³ The holiday camp was designed to offer, at minimal cost, an inclusive holiday for the whole family where every member of that family, weary parents, restless teenagers and obstreperous children, would be kept fully amused from their moment of waking, an event traditionally accompanied by some hideously cheerful greeting over the camp's intercom system, to the blissful moment when exhaustion induced sleep. You will remember, for example, how the ‘kiddies’ at Camp Erpingham ‘were having a quick run round with Matron’. The reputation of the holiday camp with the middle-class, and it is the middle-class which frequents the theater, and with the intellectual, and it is the intellectual who becomes a drama critic, was ghastly, and even at the level of popular humor the holiday camp rivalled the mother-in-law as a source of cheap jibes. The camps were depicted as penitentiaries and their staff as warders whose main function was to foil escape; accommodation was reputed to be in poorly constructed chalets whose roofs always leaked and this in the British climate; food was reckoned to be revolting even by the standard of the British working-class cuisine; worst of all, however, was the enforced hilarity affected by the redcoats and inflicted on the holidaymakers—you had to enjoy yourself or else! Most notorious a form of entertainment was the competition like the Glamorous Granny contest or the Mother and Child contest or the Bathing Beauty contest run at Camp Erpingham, which had, moreover, its own special refinement, the disability bonus, won at the beginning of Orton's romp by Mr. Laurie Russel who, though both his legs were certified ‘absolutely useless’ by the resident medical officer (trained at Dachau perhaps?), performed the Twist and the Bossa Nova ‘to the tune specified on the entrance form’. No less bizarre and unique, I hope, to Orton's camp was the Ugliest Woman competition nearly won by Chief Redcoat Riley and the Screaming contest, the source of the eventual riot. The British holiday camp could be a very strange place indeed.

Another problem of a rather special kind is posed by the Euripidean background of The Erpingham Camp. Orton's version of the Bacchae has been overtaken by events. Note that it was in 1966 that the play was first presented, and next consider what happened to the Bacchae in the last years of the sixties and the early seventies. At that period of time by far the two most popular tragedies by Euripides were his Trojan Women and the Bacchae. The former was vastly popular because in this play we are brought face to face not only with the absolute desolation of the vanquished Trojan women but also with the corruption and brutalization that a war to the death inspired in the victorious Greeks. An analogy between the war before Troy and the war in Vietnam was seductive. The Bacchae owed its popularity to a social and not a political revolution, the appearance of liberation cults and a growing desire to overthrow the existing order of society in favor of total freedom. John Bowen's The Disorderly Women makes Euripides' maenads contemporary hippies, and I shall never forget myself a production of the Bacchae that I witnessed some ten years ago in which Dionysus was a thinly veiled Charles Manson. Since then I have sat in at more than one seminar when it has been argued that in the Bacchae Euripides is striking a blow for women's emancipation—actually I find the tragedy a poor advertisement for any women's liberation movement. But this is how we react to the Bacchae today, and such a reaction must diminish an appreciation of any comic treatment of its theme. And the ‘philosophy’ expressed in Orton's comedy, as when Riley tells Erpingham ‘one flick of Fortune's wheel and you'll be brought low’ or when Harrison warns Erpingham that ‘your stiff-necked attitude will bring untold harm’ seems trite though no triter, I should add, than many of the words of wisdom delivered in Greek tragedy.

On the positive side, it ought to be acknowledged how effectively in The Erpingham Camp Orton provides a substitute for the Greek chorus in the form of the songs which punctuate the text as the comedy unfolds. Music off-stage is to be heard throughout; Riley sings his Irish number as the entertainment commences; as the excitement reaches a climax Eileen gives a rendition of ‘Knees-up, Mother Brown’; the besieged Erpingham and his acolytes join in the hymn ‘Love Divine, All Loves Excelling’; the final stage direction reads, ‘A great choir is heard singing “The Holy City”’. Precise parallels between Euripides and Orton are more numerous and closer than Esslin admits. Take the death of Erpingham: in the corresponding incident in the Bacchae Euripides has Pentheus also tumbling down to his death but this time as the raging women of Thebes uproot the tree from which the king has been spying on their revels. Another parallel is provided by Dionysus' destruction of Pentheus' palace in the Bacchae³⁴ and by the damage wrought on property by the impassioned campers. But a much more telling link, for it explains a scene in The Erpingham Camp that otherwise holds little meaning, comes when Erpingham changes his clothes for the evening, donning white tie and tails and a pair of corsets. This scene surely was suggested by the transvestism practised by Pentheus when he follows the advice of Dionysus and dresses in women's clothes so that he may spy on the devotees of the god.³⁵ Euripides lingers long over the dressing of Pentheus, and it is not difficult to see the attraction of such a scene for Orton, who as early as The Ruffian on the Stair has Wilson tell Joyce that he is wearing a pair of his brother's white shorts, inconvenient though they are because ‘there's no fly’, while in What the Butler Saw clothes are exchanged between the sexes with a reckless abandon. And there is also Orton's superb joke in that play when Mrs. Prentice asks her husband whether he has taken up transvestism, adding, ‘I'd no idea our marriage teetered on the edge of fashion’.

But Erpingham's corset is also meant to suggest the wearing of the same garment by the ‘strait-laced’, the Prussian officer or Victorian gentleman, the types of person who could say with Erpingham ‘my camp is a pure camp’ or cover up a portrait of the Queen when getting changed. The Greek dramatist had mask as well as costume by which he might convey to the audience the essential quality of a character, but Orton was reduced to costume alone and this means of identification he used with great adroitness. Erpingham is identified as Orton's Pentheus by the clothes he puts on as much as by his statements and his behavior. But who is Orton's Dionysus? Is it really Chief Redcoat Riley with his sash and medal? Writing to Lindsay Anderson in 1964 Orton sketched the plot of what was to become The Erpingham Camp:

A representative group of sturdy, honest English folk, respectably pleasuring themselves at an August Holiday Camp, find themselves subjected to the influence of an intense, demonic leader. Their conventional habits … are cast aside; they feel liberation; they abandon themselves under the tutelage of Don [Dionysus] to impulse.³⁶

But there is no character in The Erpingham Camp who bears the significant name Don; there is, however, a character with the equally suggestive name of Kenny, the abbreviation for Kenneth, Halliwell's Christian name, and it is this Kenny who is the husband of a pregnant wife and it is an insult to that wife which initiates the riot; and Kenny leads the rioters and leads them wearing a costume as indicative of his role as the white tie and tails assumed for the evening of disaster by Erpingham, for Kenny is chosen as this week's ‘Tarzan of the Apes’ and puts on the appropriate leopard skin. My argument that the leopard skin makes Kenny Orton's Dionysus may be readily confirmed if we now turn to Orton's last comedy, What the Butler Saw.

In that play Sergeant Match wears a leopard-spotted dress which, as the action concludes, is torn from one shoulder when the policeman descends through the skylight by a rope ladder³⁷ streaming with blood. The stage directions at the end of the play are as elaborate as those for the conclusion of The Erpingham Camp:

Everyone embraces one another. The skylight opens, a rope ladder is lowered and, in a great blaze of glory, SERGEANT MATCH … descends … The dying sunlight from the garden and the blaze from above gild SERGEANT MATCH. … They pick up their clothes and weary, bleeding, drugged and drunk, climb the rope ladder into the blazing light.

In What the Butler Saw Dionysus in the form of an appropriately clad Sergeant Match descends from heaven just as in the Bacchae the god appears as the action of the drama is completed on the roof of the stage building,³⁸ the deus ex machina of which Euripides was especially fond. And this is not the only Euripidean touch at this point of the play, for, immediately before, Nick and Geraldine are recognized as the twin offspring of the Prentices as Mrs. Prentic spots the pair of brooches she left with her children when she abandoned them. This motif, we are invariably told, derives from the Importance of Being Earnest and reflects the influence of Wilde, and it is true that the mother was raped on the second floor of the Station Hotel.³⁹ Yet it has also been remarked that here we encounter ‘the classical Plautean comedy of the separated twins’⁴⁰ and behind Plautus, of course, we have Greek New Comedy and behind Greek New Comedy lurks the person of Euripides. An ancient source, for instance, claims Euripides as the origin of Menandrean recognition,⁴¹ and an example offers confirmation: in the Ion of Euripides a woman, Creusa queen of Athens, who has been raped and subsequently abandoned her son, recovers the long-lost Ion when she recognizes the baby clothes in which she exposed her infant offspring and the accompanying jewelry.⁴² This is not a point I wish to press but the Ion also concludes with a divine epiphany and earlier there has been an attempt by Creusa to kill the unknown youth who is eventually shown to be her missing son. Instead I prefer to quote an astute commentator on the play and her remark that ‘the means by which Creusa proves her identity (i.e. as Ion's mother) are a combination of physical token and intimate knowledge; the guessing game form that the scene takes here is unique and has in its stage business a touch of what we would call comedy about it’.⁴³

Orton liked recognition tokens; that sad play The Good and Faithful Servant features such a device, the ring which reveals to Buchanan that Edith is the woman he loved so many years before. What the Butler Saw closes with the production of another object which may be regarded as a type of recognition token, for just as Euripides' Ion produces a basket which will be found to contain proof of his birth, so Geraldine in Orton's play possesses a box which is found to contain the ‘missing parts’ from a larger than lifesized bronze statue of Winston Churchill, and this ‘object’ is so much more potent than the symbol of Churchill's cigar. Churchill's phallus reinforces Orton's Dionysiac imagery, for there could be no more characteristic an attribute of the Greek god than the phallus; a phallus, for example, is paraded by the worshippers as the Rural Dionysia is celebrated in Aristophanes' Acharnians.⁴⁴ The phallus in fact typifies not only Dionysus but also the performance of Old Comedy in fifth-century Athens, and the basic comic costume consisted of tights to which a leather version of the phallus was attached.⁴⁵ But the link between the conclusion of What the Butler Saw and Aristophanes is considerably closer, for Aristophanes had preceded Orton by well over two thousand years in holding up to ridicule Euripides' penchant for the deus ex machina. Both comic writers found Euripides' fondness for this piece of theater impossible to resist and both restored to parody. Take the case of Aristophanes' Peace, a comedy commemorating the signing of a peace treaty between Athens and Sparta after ten years of devastating war and a comedy of enduring appeal.⁴⁶ I wish to be scrupulously fair in presenting the Aristophanic evidence and so have chosen to take advantage of Albin Lesky's summary of the first half of the Peace, abbreviating this to some extent. After the mid-point of the play represented by the parabasis we meet the usual series of farcical scenes in which Aristophanes reveals the mad consequences of the action taken before the parabasis.

The hero of the Peace is a vinegrower Trygaeus who keeps a huge dung-beetle. Lesky notes:

This creature is to serve its enterprising owner as transport to heaven, where he will ask Zeus what he has in mind for the war-weary Hellenes. Again the fanciful invention has a specific target: the ride on the dung-beetle is a parody of the Bellerophon of Euripides, in which the hero tried to reach heaven on his winged steed. … Trygaeus reaches his goal and enters into discussions with Hermes. He notes with disapproval that the gods have withdrawn into the highest aether to be away from the endless horrors of war, and Polemos (i.e. War) reigns unchecked. He has shut up the goddess of peace, Eirene, in a pit. … Trygaeus … leads the rescue of Eirene, who is pulled up from her pit by ropes. At the same moment two goddesses appear—Opora, goddess of fruitfulness, and Theoria, who stands for joy at festivals … they all return to earth, not by the dung-beetle on a stage flying-machine (Trygaeus and his three goddesses would have overloaded it), but by simply climbing down a route which is pointed out by Hermes with a light-hearted breaking of the dramatic illusion.’⁴⁷

Orton had read translations of Aristophanes, and anybody who has done that knows that Aristophanes enjoyed poking fun at Euripides and his use of stage machinery. After all, Euripides appears as a character in three of the surviving comedies of Aristophanes, the Acharnians, in which Euripides' employment of the wheeled platform is mocked, the Thesmophoriazusae, and the Frogs. I mentioned some time ago (see p. 106) Orton's claim that his favorite play was Euripides' Andromeda though that tragedy has failed to survive. In making such a claim was Orton just lying in order to create an impression or did he confuse the Andromeda with some other play by the Athenian? Perhaps there is a third possibility though I advance it with hesitation: Did Orton know of the Andromeda from Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazusae, since Euripides' play is parodied quite mercilessly in that comedy as Euripides in the guise of Perseus comes ‘flying’ on stage in order to rescue his kinsman Mnesilochus?⁴⁸ But Aristophanes' most notorious reference to the Andromeda comes early in the Frogs when the god Dionysus, posing as an intellectual, tells his half-brother the brutish Heracles that he was on a ship reading the Andromeda and was suddenly seized by a yearning desire:

DIONYSUS:
And as I sat on deck, reading Andromeda, a sudden pang of agonizing longing shot through my heart—I was overwhelmed.
HERACLES:
How big a pang?
DIONYSUS:
Well, Molon-size …
HERACLES:
For a woman?
DIONYSUS:
No.
HERACLES:
A boy?
DIONYSUS:
No, no.
HERACLES:
A man?
DIONYSUS:
(sighs). Ooooh'.(49)

This, I guarantee, is an exchange not likely to have passed unnoticed by Orton. All this persuades me, and you too I hope, that we are justified in detecting an Aristophanic flavor at the end of What the Butler Saw and that flavor is more than a slight whiff.

Any number of general comparisons between the comic technique and the language of Aristophanes and Orton are possible, but these tend to represent the stock-in-trade of the comic dramatist, and I will be brief. Both attack the authorities and the system, Aristophanes generals, politicians, jurymen and so on, while for Orton policemen are corrupt, clergymen murderers, psychiatrists mad and so on. I have always wanted to produce an only mildly adapted version of Aristophanes' Clouds in which Socrates is presented as very much a fifth-century Greek equivalent of the contemporary psychiatrist, a Dr. Prentice or Dr. Rance. There is a magnificent scene in the Clouds when Strepsiades is ordered by Socrates to lie down on a couch and to think: there is a strictly Ortonesque note when Socrates asks if Strepsiades has got a hold of anything at all and Strepsiades replies, ‘Nothing, apart from my cock in my right hand’.⁵⁰ Orton and Aristophanes share a very similar brand of humor, both verbal humor and sexually orientated humor, and both would be in agreement that comedy furnishes a much more devastating weapon than tragedy. But let me draw to a close not with a comparison or with an argument, both of which have been inflicted upon you in what I hope is an abundance, but rather with a statement of faith. While in prison Gombold, the hero of Orton's novel Head to Toe, is ‘educated’ by a fellow-prisoner, the learned Doktor von Pregnant, and study takes the place of liberty as ‘days, months and years passed in one rapid and instructive course’. Before this process began, the Doktor had assumed that Gombold must be acquainted with languages but he was wrong. ‘No … I have little Litthom and less Glook’, he was informed by Gombold, who went on to add, ‘I rely upon translations’. ‘Well, well’, observed the Doktor, ‘better a translation than remain in ignorance.’⁵¹ In my opinion the Doktor understates the case for translations, for I believe with Louis Kelly that ‘western Europe owes its civilization to translators’.⁵² Need I do more than quote the Bible in support of my belief that it has been translations and not texts in the original language which have shaped our intellectual and literary traditions? And so I like to think that any discussion of Orton's debt to the Greeks is of more than just academic interest, though that debt was owed to translations and another taste acquired under the influence of Kenneth Halliwell.

But I betray Orton in ending so seriously, yet I also believe that Orton is often much more serious than that dazzling dialogue of his may lead us to suspect. Go back to The Good and Faithful Servant. I know of no other play, whether comedy or tragedy or a mixture of both, which indicts more crushingly the demands made by society today and the rewards offered by society today. Of course, Orton defined the problem but posited no solution. Nor for that matter did Socrates. Religion provided no answer for Orton, a comment which allows me to give Orton the final word by quoting my own favorite joke from his plays. In scene six of Funeral Games Tessa asks McCorquodale what has happened to his wife and the following exchange ensues:

MCCORQUODALE:
She was taken up to Heaven. In a fiery chariot. Driven by an angel.
TESSA:
What nonsense. Valerie would never accept a lift from a stranger.

Notes

1. I quote from John Lahr's, Prick up your Ears, the Biography of Joe Orton (London, 1978) 15, an Orton BBC interview. Anyone writing on Orton owes an immense debt to the otherwise unpublished material assembled by Lahr, who also contributes an introduction to the standard edition of Orton, Joe Orton, the Complete Plays (London, 1976/New York, 1977). Much briefer but especially well illustrated is an article ‘The Life and Death of Joe Orton’ by James Fox, published in the Sunday Times Magazine for the 22nd November, 1970. Critical discussion of Orton's comedies is sparse and not very helpful with the exception of Maurice Charney on Entertaining Mr. Sloane in New York Literary Forum 4, (1980) 171-178 and on What The Butler Saw in Modern Drama 25, 4, (Dec. 1982) 496-504. The series ‘Contemporary Writers’ includes a somewhat pretentious essay by C. W. E. Bigsby, Joe Orton (London and New York, 1982). I have benefited much more from the comments of two colleagues, H. M. Quinn and Professor B. R. Rees.

2. Lahr, 250.

3. Lahr, 200; cf. 136-140. For a genuinely indignant reaction to displays of violence and cruelty on the stage in the sixties, including ‘the kicking to death of an old man’, see Pamela Hansford Johnson, On Iniquity (London, 1967) 47ff.

4. Lahr, 341 n. 25; cf. 107.

5. Lahr, 313.

6. ‘Homosexuality’ is preferred today and discussion of the topic is no longer inhibited, as is very evident from K. J. Dover, Greek Homosexuality (London, 1978). A more concise account is offered by L. P. Wilkinson, Classical Attitudes to Modern Issues (London, 1978), 111ff. At the same time, pederasty is a more precise description of Greek homosexuality which ‘typically took the form of pederasty with an adolescent junior partner and occupied a defined, and transient, phase in the masculine life-cycle’ (Paul Cartledge, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society no. 207 (1981) 17). See further George Devereux, ‘Greek Pseudo-Homosexuality and the “Greek Miracle”’, Symbolae Osloenses 42, (1967) 69-92, on ‘displaced fathering’ and, with reference to the relationship between Halliwell and Orton, his remark, ‘the erastes was a father surrogate (educator) and the eromenos a son surrogate (pupil)’, 79.

7. Plato, Theaetetus 151a, translated by F. M. Cornford in Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (ed.), The Collected Dialogues of Plato (Princeton, 1963) 855-856.

8. Symposium 215ff.

9. Lahr, 23-24; cf. 321.

10. Lahr, 135-36.

11. A History of Education in Antiquity (London, paperback edition 1977) 26ff.

12. Lahr, 120.

13. Iliad 24, verses 527ff.

14. Herodotus 1, 30ff.

15. Lahr, 288.

16. Herodotus 1, 32, 4; Lahr, 2 and 146.

17. Lahr, 20. On ‘the enviousness of fate’ in ancient thought, see, for example, G. J. D. Aalders in M. J. Vermaseren (ed.), Studies in Hellenistic Religions (Leiden, 1979) 1-8.

18. Lahr, 123.

19. Lahr, 199.

20. Lahr, 335.

21. Lahr, 66.

22. Classical Mythology, an Annotated Bibliographical Survey (Urbana, 1973), 15. See also Marie Cleary, Classical Journal 75, (1979-80) 248-249.

23. Lahr, 87 and 119. An extensive knowledge of classical mythology is also apparent in Orton's novel Head to Toe, written ten years before its posthumous publication (London, 1971),

24. Lahr, 29.

25. Public lavatories are still prominent in the ‘mythology’ of British homosexuality and remain a source of unending humor, a factor always to be taken into account in assessing the events listed in Orton's diaries. Thus the issue of the satiric magazine Private Eye for the 30th July, 1982 included the following item from the North Avon Gazette:

    Three men, all in their 60's, were found by police committing indecent acts with each other in public toilets at Northville Road, Filton, a court heard this week. Mr. Miles described the offences as ‘at the bottom end of the scale’ of seriousness.

26. ‘The Biter Bit, Joe Orton introduces Entertaining Mr. Sloane in Conversation with Simon Trussler’, Plays and Players, August 1964, 16.

27. Lahr, 177.

28. Oedipus at Colonus, verses 1154ff., 1181ff. and 1348-1351.

29. Oedipus at Colonus, verses 1156ff., 1278 and 1285ff.

30. In the lecture ‘Poetry and Drama’, included in Frank Kermode (ed.), Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot (London, 1975), 144.

31. Proceedings of the Classical Association 50, (1953), 14. Eliot and Orton are not the only artists whose debt to classical sources was unrecognized until they themselves declared it. We may also compare, for example, Wagner to whose Die Meistersinger Hugh Lloyd-Jones refers as follows: ‘that the address of Hans Sachs at the end of the work was inspired by the conclusion of Aeschylus' Eumenides would have been a bold guess. But we have Wagner's own word for it is that it was so, which may remind us that the processes by which an artist's mind works upon the material which it makes use of are not always to be discovered by the light of reason' (Blood for The Ghosts, Classical Influences in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, London, 1982, 130).

32. Contemporary English Drama (Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 19, London, 1981) 103.

33. Compare James Walvin, Beside the Seaside, a Social History of the Popular Seaside Holiday (London, 1978), 133-135.

34. Bacchae, verses 1103ff. and 585ff.

35. Bacchae, verses 821ff. On this motif in Euripides' play, see G. S. Kirk, The Bacchae of Euripides (Cambridge, 1979), 93-94 (=note on verses 857-860).

36. Lahr, 338, n. 11.

37. Lahr, 329 points out the pun on the Greek word for ladder klimax and Rance's line, ‘We're approaching what our racier novelists term “the climax”’.

38. Bacchae, verses 1330 ff.

39. On the similarities between the plays of Wilde and Orton, see especially Katharine J. Worth, Revolutions in Modern English Drama (London, 1972), 151-153.

40. Esslin, 105.

41. Vita lines 8-9 (Nauck). The ancient life of Euripides is translated by Mary R. Lefkowitz, The Lives of the Greek Poets (London, 1981), appendix 5 (= 163-169).

42. Ion, verses 1395ff.

43. Anne Pippin Burnett, Ion by Euripides (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1970), 118 (=note on verse 1412).

44. Acharnians, verses 237ff.

45. Sir Arthur Pickard-Cambridge, The Dramatic Festivals of Athens (Oxford, second edition 1968), 220-222.

46. Aristophanes and the contemporary theater are well discussed by G. François, ‘Aristophane et le Théâtre Moderne’, L'Antiquité Classique 40, (1971), 38-79. See also on the problem of producing Aristophanic comedy today, Constantine Trypanis, Proceedings of the British Academy 65, (1979), 493-496.

47. A History of Greek Literature (London, 1966), 436-437.

48. Thesmophoriazusae, verses 1010ff.

49. I quote the translation of Frogs, verses 52-57 by Patric Dickinson, Aristophanes, Plays II (Oxford, 1970), 183.

50. Clouds, verse 4. ‘Obscene Language in Attic Comedy’ is the sub-title of The Maculate Muse by Jeffrey Henderson (New Haven and London, 1975), a study which offers a wealth of information on sexual humor in Aristophanes.

51. Head to Toe, 65.

52. L. G. Kelly, The True Interpreter, and History of Translation Theory a Practice in the West (Blackwell, Oxford, 1949), 1.