His supposed depravity explicitly countered their good behavior, but for a few short months an odd collaboration was in the works. After Joe Orton wrote Up Against It in 1967 as a screenplay to showcase the Beatles, the script was returned with no explanation, though the inference might be that not all working-class artists have the same intentions in mind. Nonetheless, Chicago's Lookingglass Theatre has staged the text almost verbatim and punctuated it with original songs echoing early 1960s British rock. To an extent, the conflation of the Orton persona and that of the pop musician makes sense. Both feature the posturing of young men with a talent for expressing libidinal urgencies with a nonchalant air, an element for which the ensemble's principals find the right tone. The inverted dandyism of Up Against It's trio of disaffected adventurers is ably demonstrated by Lance Baker, Douglas Hara, and Raymond Fox, whose poise serves both the wit of Orton's dialogue and the contrasting banality of the ensemble's original music and lyrics.

But ultimately the Lookingglass production founders under the live-performance weight of dozens of disconnected scenes initially conceived for film. Director Bruce Norris's well-devised commotion during each transition stresses the point that Orton was depicting social chaos, but ignores the elegant style in which the author was trying to frame his subject. Actors grab instruments and microphones from an on-stage bandstand and step back and forth between Orton's formal text and their own raucous concert acts. Descriptions of scene locations are posted on the back wall of a barren, all-purpose set. Gimmicks, such as hand-tossed paper sprinklings or manually operated cutout scenery, steal an occasional laugh. The apparent idea is to “announce” rather than enact stage directions; the result is crude theatrical artificiality.

Of course, heavy-handed artifice is consistent with Orton's vision, provided that the actors themselves grasp the superficiality of their characters' circumstances and perform indelicacy delicately. To this end, the Lookingglass actors have succeeded only partially. The young male characters display a graceful flippancy, a mark of awareness that there is nothing much at stake in the world. Devoid of beliefs, their oppositional stance is wholly performed, denoted in the manner in which they wear their affectations. Unfortunately, the other characters are played as cardboard figures, as though the uncertainties of their condition must also be meaningless. Male antagonists are reduced to the tired business of low comedians. Women are portrayed as dissembling, repulsive, or daft.

Indeed, the Lookingglass production typifies the kind of performance interpretation that has allowed Orton's plays to be popularly mistaken for the writings of a misogynist. It is understandable that the resiliency of welfare-state women in Orton's earlier plays is often misread as cloying stupidity. But I would argue that in the script of Up Against It gender privileges are reversed and male characters assume the more degraded position. The Lookingglass performers, however, tell a different story. Christine Dunford strongly enacts the sexual indulgences of a feral police chief who forces herself on her male captives, but also celebrates the advantages of corruption by disrobing during a vamp-striptease number that utterly contradicts her character. Heidi Stillman plays a heroine with no sentiment as though the character also has no brain. And Joy Gregory as an intrepid parlormaid, who pursues one husband and ends up with three, expresses desire with an incongruous tendency to swoon. As they appear in this production, women cannot affect trivial obsessions without actually becoming trivial, and the performance of learned female behavior amounts to little more than a bald sexist joke. Consequently, Orton's characters are denied their capacity as conscious imitators to satirize anything other than themselves.

Twenty-eight years ago, Ronald Bryden suggested in an Observer review the need to find an “Orton style,” and it appears the need still exists. In its rousing demonstration of energy, polish, and exhibitionism, the Lookingglass ensemble shares only a sporadic and intuitive empathy with the text. One actor's program note even disclaims “The Message About Women in This Play.” That very “message” was in fact invented in performance, and the blame wrongly ascribed to the author.