[In the following review, Helfer says that Fred and Madge deserves staging but is less enthusiastic about Between Us Girls and The Visitors.]

Like Hemingway, Joe Orton is having a prolific posthumous career. Between Us Girls and The Visitors and Fred and Madge are part of a large amount of writing done before Orton's fame.

Between Us Girls is a novel from 1957. Some might be surprised to see an Orton novel, but that was how he started writing, first in collaboration with Kenneth Halliwell, his lover and eventual murderer, and then on his own. It is, or starts out as, the diary of Susan Hope, a well-read but not very bright English girl with a desire to enter show business. Orton makes much of her inability to see the seediness of the jobs offered her. She leaves a job in a shabby nightclub for what turns out to be a Mexican white-slavery ring. Escaping the slavery ring—on the second day, not before being with a client (this is Orton, after all)—she flees to Hollywood, where she becomes a star.

I think Orton might have lost interest in this as he went along—or, at least might have wanted another draft before a final version. The amount of detail lessens by the middle so that the early sections, with the least action, take up the most room. He seems to drop the idea that we are reading a diary; and the ingenue protagonist frequently offers descriptions that show an Orton-clear eye rather than that of an innocent. Despite all that, the book is, to use a technical term, a hoot.

The plays, together in one volume, are also worthwhile, though only faintly foreshadowing the style that would make Orton famous. The Visitors, from 1959, is written in three “acts,” but is actually a television screenplay and was optioned by the BBC. Set in a hospital, it is a much more realistic and somber Orton than we are used to, and more loosely centered, as we follow nurses and visitors from room to room. The main characters are an elderly man, evidently in the final stages of a terminal disease, and his middle-aged daughter. Orton makes it clear that her blind cheeriness and refusal to face the facts of the situation actually deprive the old man of a chance to come to terms with his life. This criticism, and the hint that she is typical of her middle-class existence, are the clearest signs of Orton in what is a well-done and affecting but not unusual work.

1961s Fred and Madge is also untypical, but much stronger; indeed, I think it's one of the better absurdist plays I've come across, and I wonder why someone is not producing it now. The opening is very much in an Ionesco mode, as Fred and Madge discuss the boredom of their life—Fred has a job rolling rocks uphill, and Madge works at a water-sieving plant. Even here though, the specific social comment is stronger than Ionesco, and Fred reveals a deeper underlying anger.

By the second act, Fred has left both his job and Madge; and the play leaves Ionesco for Aristophanes and Lewis Carroll, with some possible minor assistance from Thornton Wilder and a plot device from Noel Coward. Orton starts destroying more and more of late '50s British society and makes the idea of “trashing” literal by roaming London, destroying buildings by laughing at them, leading to the magnificent passage:

WEBBER:
Do you want to ruin society and civilization with your laughter?
MADGE:
Yes oh yes!

This is a current cliché, but how exhilarating to see it in the original form, when it meant something.

By the end, the play and characters float away from earthly bounds, as all leave Britain and modern society for a dream-vision India.

I recommend both of these books, not just to the Orton scholar, but to anyone who loves a good, anarchic, laugh.