[In the following essay, McCray discusses the cynicism of most of Orton's work, suggesting that much of it derives from Orton's own life experience.]

I assure you that it is possible to draw poison from the clearest of wells.

Joe Orton to Glen Loney, March 25, 1966

On Jan. 2, 1967, Joe Orton, London's then most promising young playwright, who shocked, instructed, and entertained the theater-going public of the town, wrote in his diary: “In the evening P. Willes rang. … I told him about the [Orton's mother's] funeral. And the frenzied way my family behave. He seemed shocked. But then he thinks my plays are fantasies. He suddenly caught a glimpse of the fact that I write the truth.”¹ The truth, according to Orton, seems to be that people do not feel love or hate, happiness or sorrow, for the world offers nothing to believe in. Sex is simply something to pass the time; God is reduced to Church, defeated by life but “always well-equipped to deal with Death.” And the government is peopled by individuals as corrupt as those they govern. And so Orton laughs at the world that can never be redeemed. This is not farce as antidote, as Katherine Worth suggests it is, for there is no cure.² Neither is it, as Martin Esslin insists, the “mindless laugh … which amounts to no more than an idiot's giggle at his own image in a mirror.”³ Like Beckett and Pinter, Orton laughs a bitter laugh, at a world that is “a cruel and heartless place.”⁴

Reared in a dingy house in Leicester, Orton grew up listening to the rantings of his ambitious but unskilled mother, who tried desperately though unsuccessfully to make their home comfortable. His mother's frustrated and financially disastrous attempts at genteel living brought bitterness and gloom to their oppressive city project house. Orton never totally escaped the dreariness that characterized his early youth. In another diary entry in 1967—years after he had moved out of the house at Fayhurst Road—Joe Orton recorded a conversation which evokes his rather dismal childhood:

“Yes, I've discovered I look best in cheap clothes.” [said Orton.] “I wonder what the significance of that is?” Oscar [Lewenstein] said. “I'm from the gutter,” I said. “And don't you ever forget it because I won't.”

(p. 38)

And he did not forget it. The abortive attempts of his mother to better their plight made Orton doubtful that man could ever escape the tawdriness of his environment.

In his works, the drab home of his childhood takes on a sinister decay. Orton sees putrefaction everywhere from specific settings like Fayhurst Road to the world at large. He depicts spiritually and physically mutilated people, living in crumbling homes filled with broken “conveniences.” In Endgame, Hamm tells Clove, “We breathe, we change! We lose our hair, our teeth! Our bloom! Our ideals!”⁵ And so it often is with Orton characters. The bloom is gone. Ideals are nonexistent.

Orton uses impoverished settings to reflect his spiritually impoverished characters. This is the case in The Ruffian on the Stair, in which Mike and Joyce live in a ransacked building in an apartment, sparingly decorated with old furniture. As emotionally ransacked as their building is empty, the two never display any tender feelings—not for others as poor as themselves, not for their boarder, Wilson, not even for each other.

Similar domestic settings appear in other plays, such as Funeral Games and The Good and Faithful Servant. But the setting of Entertaining Mr. Sloane offers Orton's most striking reminder that most people are from the gutter. Kemp's house, the “world” of the play, is built in the center of a rubbish dump. We are meant, as Orton's readers, to suspect our entire world as a larger version of Kemp's front yard:

Look at it out there. An eyesore. You may admire it. I don't. A woman came all the way from Woolwich yesterday. A special trip she made in order to dump a bedstead. I told her, what do you want to saddle us with your filthy mess for? Came over in a shooting brake. She was an old woman. Had her daughter with her. Fouling the countryside with their litter.

(p. 72)

The way Kemp views the woman seems to reflect Orton's regard for society in general. The world is an eyesore, with people constantly “dumping” on one another, “fouling the countryside with their litter.” Anyone who protests—Kemp, Wilson, or Erpingham—is crushed, becoming quite literally part of the refuse.

In his only novel, Head to Toe, Orton depicts in savage detail man's physical environment, and by so doing delivers his most direct and biting portrait of a totally corrupt society. He compares it and its ideologies to a corpse:

The prospect of living on a corpse did not affect many people. Indeed there were those who maintained the giant was not dead. Presented with the rotting flesh and the presence of maggots where once had been pleasant acres, they spoke in terms of temporary phenomena.⁶

Orton is clearly mocking those who speak of the world in optimistic terms. The corpse cannot be revived and so the decay will necessarily continue. Only a few relatively sensitive characters like Kemp understand this. Most are inured to the corruption around them. They can live in the middle of the dump and never smell the stench. Thus Martin Esslin and John Russell Taylor's accusation that Orton's characters are hollow puppets is scarcely surprising.⁷ Given the world Orton sees, such characters, must be hollow if they are to survive.

Those who do not make it, those who have not “toughened up”—the sensitive, the simple, the kind—are invariably doomed. According to Orton, good guys are lucky to finish last, lucky to finish at all. To survive one must have a wickedly quick intelligence, be able to adapt to any situation, and be completely enervated emotionally.

Mike, a survivor in The Ruffian on the Stair, is just such a character. The play opens with Joyce asking him about his work:

JOYCE:
Have you got an appointment today?
MIKE:
Yes. 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.(8)

Mike goes to such interesting places because financially he is “in a bad way.” In a conversation with Wilson—a stranger looking for a room—Mike says, “With the cost of living being so high, I'm greatly in need of a weekly donation from the government … I've filled in a form to the effect that I'm a derelict” (p. 49).

He is a derelict who will hit a man with his van for a fee (250 quid exclusive of repairs to the van) and so he makes ends meet. Like Ben and Gus, who are similarly employed in Pinter's The Dumb Waiter, Mike speaks euphemistically about his job. He tells Wilson, “As a matter of fact, you've kept me. I've missed an appointment. Is shall have to drop them a line an apologize for the absence” (p. 49). The real situation behind these ever so polite words is that Mike has failed to kill a man. The disparity between Mike's diction and his actual meaning is both comic and chilling. Taking what business he can, he has totally anesthetized himself to any humane feelings.

In Entertaining Mr. Sloane certainly no one—except Kemp, who is brutally kicked to death—displays any depth of emotion. After Sloane murders Kemp, Kemp's children, Kath and Ed, do not experience grief or outrage, but instead use the circumstances of their father's death to keep their hold on Sloane. Both Kath and Ed are vying for Sloane's sexual favors and both have the “goods” on him. As for Sloane, he is ready to go with whoever can best save him. Finally, brother and sister decide to share him—six months for Ed, six months for Kath. Sloane responds favorably to the arrangement:

SLOANE:
I'll be grateful.
ED:
Will you?
SLOANE:
Eternally.
ED:
Not eternally boy. Just a few years.

Sloane's adaptability has saved him from prison, but it will take more than that to save him from the ravages of the “few years” with Kath and Ed.

It is easy to see why, in his review of Entertaining Mr. Sloane, Harold Hobson wrote, “It is a vision of total evil” (Lahr, p. 168). Yes, the vision is evil, in this and all other Orton plays. The characters are either ruthlessly self-indulgent, motivated entirely by self-interest, or they are those who are victimized by the former. And even those who win out, enjoy only a fleeting victory, for it is a “cruel and heartless” world, where the words “not eternally boy” resound. Everything, everyone is disposable.

Orton makes clear the point—that people are disposable—by juxtaposing the mechanical breakdown or the destruction of material goods with the physical breakdown or destruction of individuals. In The Ruffian on the Stair, Wilson, the ruffian, “trashes” the stairs, and by the end of the play he, too, has been trashed. Erpingham falls through the floor to his death following the vandalizing of his camp in The Erpingham Camp. In Funeral Games, the coffins filled with rubble foreshadow the one which will later be filled with Mrs. McLeavy. In The Good and Faithful Servant, George Buchanan is given a toaster and clock, symbols of the company's gratitude for his fifty years of service. Both are broken. They are indeed symbols, symbols for what George has become for society—“a load of rubbish.” Mrs. Vealfoy makes this clear to George when she says, “Make sure you hand in your uniform. After lunch you're free. We've no further need for you” (p. 161). Mr. Buchanan has been put out on the stoop. Eventually, he smashes the clock and toaster and dies unnoticed.

Like Beckett, Orton focuses his attention on these castaways. Also, like Beckett, Orton illustrates man's mutilated spirit by first pointing to his mutilated or decrepit body. Kath of Entertaining Mr. Sloane and Mrs. McLeavy of Loot have no teeth. Kemp is blind. Mr. McLeavy (Loot) and McCorquodale (Funeral Games) are impotent. George Buchanan, deaf and nearly blind, has lost an arm on the job. (He occasionally wears a prosthetic arm, but this frightens Edith, who imagines that he has grown a third arm.) Much like Flannery O'Conner in “Good Country People” and Wise Blood, Orton casts a savage eye and laughts a bitter laugh. At times, however, Orton's savagery supersedes even O'Conner's. In Loot, the detective Truscott asks:

TRUSCOTT:
Have you never heard of Truscott? The man who tracked the limbless girl killer. Or was that before your time?
HAL:
Who would kill a limbless girl?
TRUSCOTT:
She was the killer.
HAL:
How did she do it limbless?
TRUSCOTT:
I'm not prepared to answer that question to anyone outside the profession. We don't want a carbon copy murder on our hands.

(pp. 249-250)

The situation is, of course, absurd and so we laugh. But what is evident is that no one escapes the slicing edge of Orton's wit. He never lapses into sentimentality, for he—much like Bertolt Brecht—does not want to touch the heart of the audience, or to let them sit comfortably pitying the less fortunate:

ERPINGHAM:
Our disability bonus was won by Mr. Laurie Russell of Market Harborough. Both Laurie's legs were certified “absolutely useless” by our Resident Medical Officer. Yet he performed the Twist and the Bossa Nova to the tune specified on the entrance form.
TED:
He fell over though. Twice.

(p. 283)

Like Beckett and Brecht, Orton does not elevate the disabled, nor does he treat them euphemistically, for they are only a part of a crippled world where everyone is debilitated, if not physically then spiritually.

To this picture of the physically broken and the spiritually empty, Orton adds the mentally unhinged. Many of Orton characters have a questionable grasp of reality; but in his last and most farcical play, What the Butler Saw, characters like Dr. Rance have no grasp at all.

The setting of the play is a private psychiatric clinic run by Dr. Prentice, a man more interested in seducing a secretary than treating his patients. In fact, we never see a patient. We do not need to, for those running the clinic are clearly as crazed as any patient could be. When Mrs. Prentice cries, “O this is a madhouse,” we laugh because of the specific and general truth of her statement. All are mad. And again we are to associate this setting—the small society of the clinic—with our own. Just as Orton mocks society's optimistic view of the world in Head to Toe, so he also mocks those who believe that Freudian psychiatrists can save the insane. The insane are too numerous; and unfortunately, their number includes the psychiatrists.

Even if one manages to maintain his sanity and to keep all his limbs, his plight is still not a happy one. As Orton wrote in his diary, there is still old age and death, the universal disabilities:

Took a walk. Nobody to pick up. Only a lot of disgusting old men. I shall be a disgusting old man myself one day, I thought mournfully.

(Lahr, p. 23)

There are many “disgusting” old men in his plays—Kemp, McLeavy, McCorquodale, George Buchanan. Their last years are characterized by “needles and sterile wadding.” Each has had to face the “we've no more need for you.” And they are all as useless and impotent as McLeavy who “couldn't propagate a row of tomatoes.”

The elderly are also something to be disposed of. In Entertaining Mr. Sloane Kemp says, “You'd put me in a home. (Pause) Would you be tempted?” Silence follows. Of course, Kath would be tempted, for her blind, cranky father interferes, to some extent, in her sexual play with Sloane.

In The Good and Faithful Servant, Orton's most sympathetic treatment of the old, the Company has neatly disposed of George Buchanan, a loyal but no longer useful employee. The Company tries to assuage its conscience by forming the “Bright Hours” club. The hour George spends there, amidst wheelchairs and senile, old men and women, is anything but bright. One woman falls over and dies during the party. All the while, Mrs. Vealfoy is treating everyone like children on Romper Room: “We're going to sing in a minute. That will cure your depression, won't it? Will you join in? A jolly sing-song. All the old favorites. Don't be a spoil sport. You'll join in, won't you?” (p. 88). Throughout the play, Mrs. Vealfoy provides cheery words and easy solutions. She makes people conform—they marry, retire, and sing according to her dictates—but she cannot cure their depressions. Nor does she really care to as long as she can make them seem happy.

Given Orton's world—characterized by physical and spiritual decay—one would correctly assume that death figures importantly in his plays. Only the dead are treated with more irreverence than the elderly or the disabled. Orton's plays abound with corpses and tears are not shed for any—not for Wilson, Kemp, Erpingham, Mrs. McLeavy, or Mrs. McCorquodale. The only feeling evident at all is one of relief. In Entertaining Mr. Sloane, Kath demonstrates her lack of concern for her father's murder by saying:

When doctor comes he'll want to know things. Are you asking me to deceive our G. P.? He's an extremely able man. He'll notice discrepancies. And then where will we be? He'd make his report and mamma would be behind bars. I'm sure that isn't your idea. Is it?

(p. 144)

Though the man she is talking baby talk to has just kicked her father to death, her sole concern is that she not be implicated in the crime.

With a composure similar to Kath's, Joyce (The Ruffian on the Stair) coolly devises a plan to keep Mike out of trouble, even though he has just murdered Wilson. She remains to total control until she sees that the bullet has also gone through her goldfish bowl killing her fish. Then she is heartbroken: “They're dead. Poor things. And I reared them so carefully” (p. 61). Orton skillfully juxtaposes Joyce's cavalier handling of the murdered Wilson—“I've a bit of sacking somewhere”—and this emotional outburst for the dead fish.

In Funeral Games, Mrs. McCorquodale's remains are regarded even more cavalierly than Wilson's. Her husband tells a friend that “her burial was done by the National Coalboard. She's under a ton of smokeless. I got it at the reduced summer rate” (p. 331). However, the corpse which is perhaps the most abused is Mrs. McLeavy's in Loot. She is taken out of her casket so that her son and his cohort can hide their “loot.” She is then wrapped to look like a sewing dummy. (When Truscott asks, Whose mummy is this? Hal can truthfully answer, “Mine.”) When Mr. McLeavy discovers what his son has done, he demands an explanation:

MCLEAVY:
Where are your tears? She was your mother.
HAL:
It's dust, Dad.
(McLeavy shakes his head in despair)
A little dust.
MCLEAVY:
I loved her.
HAL:
You had her filleted without a qualm. Who could have affection for a half-empty woman?

(pp. 263-264)

When Hal speaks of the “half-empty woman,” there is some question whether he is referring to his mother when she was alive or now that she is dead. Such ambiguity is appropriate, for in Orton all the men and women—young or old, alive or dead—are cold and half-empty.

Though Orton writes comedies with plots verging on the fantastic and the absurd, his indictments against man and society are serious ones. As he told Willes, “I write the truth.” And the truth for the pessimistic Orton is similar to that which Bertolt Brecht voices in The Threepenny Opera:

There is of course no more to add
The world is poor and men are bad
We would be good instead of base
But this old world is not that kind of place.(9)

Notes

1. As quoted in John Lahr's, Prick Up Your Ears (New York: Knopf Pub. Co., 1978), p. 56. All future references will be included in the text.

2. Katherine Worth, Revolutions in Modern English Drama (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1972) p. 149.

3. Martin Esslin, “Joe Orton: The Comedy of (Ill) Manners.” Included in Contemporary English Drama, ed. C. W. E. Bigsby (New York: Holmes and Meier Pub. Co., 1981), p. 107.

4. Joe Orton, Radio Times, quoted in John Lahr's introduction of the Complete Plays (London: Methuen, 1976), p. vii.

5. Samuel Beckett, Endgame (New York: Grove Press, 1958), p. 11.

6. Joe Orton, Head to Toe (London: Blond, 1971), p. 157.

7. See Martin Esslin, “Joe Orton: The Comedy of (Ill) Manners,” p. 107; and John Russell Taylor, The Second Wave (New York: Hill and Wang, 1971), pp. 137-140.

8. Joe Orton, Complete Plays, ed. John Lahr (London: Methuen, 1976), p. 3. Quotations from this edition will be followed by page numbers in the text.

9. Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera (New York: Grove Press, 1964), p. 41.