Stephen Frears (1987)
On 27 July 1967, the Sexual Offences Act – ‘An Act to amend the law of England and Wales relating to homosexual acts’ – received royal assent. Thirteen days later, John Kingsley ‘Joe’ Orton was murdered by Kenneth Halliwell, with whom Orton had lived for fifteen years. The fiftieth anniversary of the two events is being marked by two concurrent BFI programmes and by the re-release in cinemas of Stephen Frears’s Prick Up Your Ears, an adaptation by Alan Bennett of John Lahr’s biography of Orton. BFI does well to separate ‘Obscenities in Suburbia’, its Orton-on-screen retrospective, from the wider-ranging ‘Gross Indecency’ season. Joe Orton’s homosexuality was, in the pre-legalisation era, distinctive. The outlawing of his sexual nature may have reinforced his appetite for subversion but Orton wasn’t oppressed, either as a writer or as a citizen, by the moral or legal strictures of his time.
The queer elements of his plays are, to varying degrees, oblique. In the 1960s, the Lord Chamberlain was still in a job and indeed censored material from Entertaining Mr Sloane and Loot (Orton was bemused, and presumably amused, that, in the case of the former, the blue pencil ‘cut all the heterosexual bits and kept all the homosexual ones’). Orton’s art was not, though, an expression of feelings or desires that had to be suppressed in his life. By all accounts (of those who knew him, in his notorious diaries), he was nervelessly promiscuous, whether cottaging in London or enjoying the local male youth on holiday in Morocco. A recent article on the BBC News website includes the recollections of his sister, Leonie, who claims that Orton didn’t support the decriminalisation of homosexuality:
‘I think Joe liked the idea of it being unacceptable, he liked that idea of him being a rebel and being outside of society. … he liked the mystique about homosexuality, he liked the closeted aspect … He wouldn’t have gone for the modern gay marriage at all.’
If Leonie is right, it’s ironic that Orton’s most important relationship turned into, in effect, an inextricable contract – a state of matrimony in a largely negative sense. Alan Bennett spent years working on a film script for Prick Up Your Ears but ‘From the start it seemed to me that the interest of Orton’s and Halliwell’s story was as an account of a marriage, or at any rate a first marriage’. The epigraph to Bennett’s published screenplay is taken from Elizabeth Hardwick’s Seduction and Betrayal: ‘This is the unspoken contract of a wife and her works …’
Thanks in the first place to John Lahr’s brilliant book, published in 1978, I got very interested in Joe Orton in the 1980s. The biography expresses, infectiously, the intellectual satisfaction and sublime entertainment the author has got from the plays. The sustained flamboyant fluency of Lahr’s prose chimes with the high-wire verve of Orton’s writing. I was an Alan Bennett as well as an Orton fan when the film of Prick Up Your Ears came out. I know I was disappointed at least partly because I’d so much looked forward to it. Lack of similar expectation may help explain why I enjoyed it more, thirty years on. The abundant verbal wit is no surprise but often a pleasure to listen to. There are good performances from Gary Oldman as Orton, Vanessa Redgrave as the theatrical agent Peggy Ramsay, and several people in minor roles. These strengths, though, are still heavily outweighed by weaknesses – chief among them an indecisive structure, a failure to convey Orton’s comic force and originality, and the conception and casting of Kenneth Halliwell, played by Alfred Molina. Besides, Stephen Frears and Bennett, in spite of the latter’s conjugal approach to the material, never really get at what kept freethinking, loose-living Orton tied to – in the sense of failing to escape from – Halliwell.
At the time of the film’s release, Alan Bennett wrote about his continuing difficulties in shaping the script. Although the discarded drafts he describes in his introduction to the screenplay sound worse than what he ended up with, the final version doesn’t work. In the early stages, the picture jumps about in place, time and narrative viewpoint, as if aiming for a collage of perspectives on Orton’s life. Collage would be apt at least as a nod to the medium of Halliwell’s visible creative legacy – the illustrations on the library books he defaced with Orton, the images on the walls of their flat at 25 Noel Road, Islington, the art works that Halliwell tried unsuccessfully to sell. (Greater use of these collages, as well as giving Frears’s film a stronger visual identity, might have helped get across a sense of Halliwell’s persisting influence in Orton’s world.) The film begins with the immediate aftermath to Orton’s murder, Halliwell’s suicide, through an overdose of sleeping pills, and the discovery of their corpses in the flat[1]. This is followed by a face-to-face interview, then a phone call, between Peggy Ramsay and John Lahr (Wallace Shawn), who is working on his biography of Orton. (Shawn makes Lahr inexplicably fatuous.) Some of this conversation is heard on a tape-recording which Lahr’s wife Anthea (Lindsay Duncan) is shown transcribing. Ramsay’s and Lahr’s voiceovers supply commentary for a brief scene of Orton posing naked, except for his socks, for the artist Patrick Procktor (a cameo from Derek Jarman). After this, Orton and Halliwell bicker at Noel Road, independently of Ramsay’s recollections to Lahr. The early scenes’ mosaic turns out to be an expression of uncertainty as to how to tell the story. The Lahr biography framework is hopeless: an attempt to parallel Anthea Lahr’s and Kenneth Halliwell’s subservient helpmate relationship to a more vigorously creative other half is so weakly contrived that it’s soon dropped. The narrative, though it continues to move back and forth chronologically, becomes biopically more conventional.
There’s plenty of stuff about the film-that-never-was that Orton was commissioned to write for the Beatles yet Stephen Frears fails to communicate the giddy momentum of his subject’s accelerating success and celebrity. And although there are individually effective scenes in Prick Up Your Ears, nothing binds them together – certainly not Joe Orton’s distinctive art. The film serves as a reminder of the difficulty of animating on screen the gifts of a writer, compared with a performer or a visual artist, whose extraordinary qualities the audience can experience more directly. Alan Bennett was well aware of this:
‘I don’t know how you dramatise the act of writing itself – it’s always a problem. I suppose you can show the paper in the typewriter, then going in the bin, like they did in Julia, with Lillian Hellman endlessly screwing stuff up and chucking it away. …’
Among writers, a poet may be the best biopic bet – in the sense that poems tend to be briefer than plays or novels; at any rate, their highlights are more easily quotable. Even so, you could do worse than a comic dramatist. Bennett’s view is that ‘Orton’s language is above all theatrical and not suited to a naturalistic film’ but this doesn’t quite explain why all there is of Orton’s plays in the film is a few lines from The Ruffian on the Stair, at the recording of the BBC radio version. The theatre bits – Halliwell making a scene at a rehearsal of Entertaining Mr Sloane, Orton in the wings and startling the actor playing Dennis (Steven Mackintosh)[2] at a performance of Loot – don’t include anything from the script of either play. Pretty well the only substantial illustration of Orton’s comic talent comes in the splendid scene in a magistrates’ court where he and Halliwell are being tried for damage to library books. A police constable (Neil Dudgeon) reads out to the court the salacious plot synopsis that Orton wrote and stuck over the real one on the jacket of Dorothy L Sayers’s Clouds of Witness. The chief magistrate (Bert Parnaby) sentences the offenders to six months in prison. Neil Dudgeon recites the scurrilous pastiche with a dutiful, embarrassed alacrity that’s perfect. Dudgeon, as well as being sympathetic to the policeman’s predicament, appreciates that Orton’s text is funny without an actor’s trying to underline the fact. Bert Parnaby gets the speech of censure from the bench right too.
Much of the first version of Bennett’s script was ‘written in Ortonese’. He realised this ‘would have been a mistake and in later versions I wrote it out’ but also admits that ‘to write in this oblique and epigrammatic way is a temptation and a pleasure and I have indulged myself a little’. In fact, more than a little. Bennett is well equipped to imitate Orton’s suggestive tabloid epigrams: although he writes more naturalistically, he shares Orton’s talent for the comic declarative, often created by combining a character’s vehemence of expression with their surprising idea of the mot juste (which stops short of malapropism). It’s not easy to make this style of writing as funny in delivery as it is on the page. In Prick Up Your Ears, the landlady at Noel Road is the main mouthpiece for this kind of pronouncement and the responsibility of uttering what reads like comedy gold weighs heavily on Janet Dale. More often than not, her line readings only vindicate Bennett’s belief that Orton’s language belongs in the theatre. It might have been different if Julie Walters, who registers strongly in her very brief appearance as Orton’s mother, had played the landlady. But the misfiring of Bennett’s faux-Orton one-liners makes the lack of the real thing, in the form of brief excerpts from rehearsals or productions of the plays, all the more conspicuous by their absence. Bennett does better when he creates a character who evokes a type or theme from an Orton play. A suave prison psychiatrist whose paternal concern for Orton cloaks a different kind of interest in him (Richard Wilson is expertly insinuating in the role) is a good example.
Bennett also somewhat indulges his penchant (one he inherited from Noel Coward) for using place names for an effect that mixes bathos with mysterious moral explanation (‘The carpet came from Reading originally’). The references to Orton’s home city of Leicester, which he couldn’t wait to get away from, are more extensive and crudely overworked. Leonie’s husband George (Stephen Bill) spits out paroxysms of provincial paranoia (‘[Joe] can’t have learned it in Leicester. He was corrupted’). This makes for an anti-climactic end to one of Bennett’s otherwise most successful marriages of Ortonesque situation and dialogue. Orton’s funeral service has taken place at Golders Green crematorium and Halliwell’s at Enfield. Peggy Ramsay, Leonie (Frances Barber) and George arrive at a mortuary with an urn. An attendant (Robin Hooper) enters, carrying another:
Attendant: Strictly speaking, we would have preferred it if both the deceased had been cremated on the premises. Intermingling would then have been carried out by experienced personnel under controlled conditions.
[He pushes the urn across to Peggy, plus another empty urn. Also a scoop. Leonie begins to scoop ashes from each urn into the third.]
Leonie: I think I’m putting in more of Joe than I am of Kenneth.
Peggy: It’s a gesture, dear, not a recipe.
George: I hope nobody hears about this in Leicester[3].
Peggy’s line is the best one here. Like all her others, it’s superbly delivered by Vanessa Redgrave, who gives one of her most easily engaging performances. It’s worth putting up with the awkward narrative structure to hear her voiceover but Redgrave is physically as well as vocally witty. Bennett found it ‘quite startling when you see Vanessa Redgrave in a mini-skirt’ – hadn’t he seen her in Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment or Blow-Up twenty years before? Redgrave not only wears Peggy’s clothes with style: her very presence evokes the 1960s, thanks to the impress of her image in the cinema of that time.
Kenneth Halliwell bludgeoned the sleeping Joe Orton to death with repeated hammer blows to the head. Halliwell was driven to depression, distraction, murder and suicide by the conviction that, having ‘made’ the younger man as a writer, he’d become as obscure as Orton was famous. The senior partner in their early novel-writing efforts, Halliwell claimed he’d taught Orton how to write in the first place and, later on, supplied the ideas and the titles for his plays. To make matters worse, his lover was, in a physical sense, no longer his lover but the lover of many other men (the result of Halliwell’s screwed-up abstinence as well as Orton’s randiness). Prick Up Your Ears opens with a close-up of Halliwell. Bloodstained and bald-headed, he stares at the murder he’s just committed. It’s an image from a horror movie and an immediate indication of why Alfred Molina is wrong for the role. In his wig (I don’t recall seeing photographs of him without it), the real Halliwell was an unremarkable camera subject. His problem of turning invisible may have been intensified by his unprepossessing appearance. The powerfully-built, strong-featured Alfred Molina, with or without a wig, is impossible to ignore and the skewed dynamic between him and Gary Oldman’s Orton undermines the story. Oldman plays Orton naturalistically, even understatedly; Molina is an expressionist study of a tortured soul. Halliwell, in the very confined space of the Noel Road flat, was no doubt a nagging, self-dramatising pain to be with (oddly, the film’s first sequence there doesn’t get the claustrophobia across). But Molina’s presence is too big and explosive: we get a sense of how badly Halliwell must have got on Orton’s nerves only because of how much Molina gets on ours. Emotionally overstated throughout, he leaves no room for the climactic, crazed lurch into homicide.
Alfred Molina almost obscures the view of Gary Oldman. Because Oldman has matured into dullness as an actor, it’s easy to forget that he made his name in the mid-1980s in star enfant terrible roles – he was Sid Vicious (in Alex Cox’s Sid and Nancy) the year before he was Joe Orton. Oldman’s work in Prick Up Your Ears is skilful and intelligent: if he doesn’t impose himself on the story, it’s because his co-star is excessive and the film fails to illustrate how Orton’s personality connected to his writing. Oldman is particularly good at showing what a canny operator Orton became – conscious of his ability to charm, he subtly adjusts his manner to suit whatever company he’s in. A scene in which, as a teenager, he enrols for classes with a grande dame elocution teacher (Margaret Tyzack) in Leicester is weak but Oldman handles the evolution of Orton’s RP accent persuasively. His cocksure quality is well judged – and credibly diminished when he and Halliwell are alone together. A gauleiter librarian (Charles McKeown), abetted by his loyal secretary (Selina Cadell), determines to bring the pair to justice for their work on library stocks: the letter he sends tricks them into incriminating themselves by responding to it. As Orton demonstrates his ear for verbal nuance, Gary Oldman gives a nice sense of his businesslike approach to writing:
Halliwell: Seat yourself at our trusty Remington, John, and we will piss on this person from a great height. … [Dictating] Thank you for your dreary little letter.
Orton: Dismal’s better.
Halliwell: Dismal then. ‘I should like to know who provided you with this mysterious information …’
Orton: Furnished is better than provided. More municipal in tone.
Alan Bennett felt he ‘had to write [the screenplay] for people who don’t know anything about Orton’. Prick Up Your Ears might have had more shocking impact, and not just for those who didn’t already know the end of the story, if the narrative had been linear, Kenneth Halliwell had been portrayed less emphatically and the murder of Orton had come out of the blue (which, in real life, it both did and didn’t). When Simon Bent adapted Prick Up Your Ears for the stage in 2009, it became a play for three characters – Orton, Halliwell and their landlady. The original casting at least (Sally and I saw the production in Richmond before it went into the West End) replicated the central problem of the film: the sight and sound of the physically extraordinary Matt Lucas eclipsed Chris New’s Orton, even though New’s acting was superior. (A difference between the film and the original stage production was the highly successful playing of the landlady in the latter, by Gwen Taylor.) Bennett acknowledged his mixed feelings of admiration and dislike for Orton and that he felt a degree of sympathy for Halliwell who, the film says, would now be completely forgotten if he hadn’t killed his famous partner. It’s as if Bennett, and Simon Bent more than twenty years later, took the view that, since we have Joe Orton’s plays to remember him by, Prick Up Your Ears should be a memorial instead to the overlooked Kenneth Halliwell.
It’s a pity, then, that Bennett undersells Halliwell’s intelligence and originality. There’s one genuinely startling and effective sequence – an acting class at RADA, when Halliwell and Orton are both students there. The instructor (Linda Spurrier) asks the group to mime holding a cat. The mimes are predictable and sentimental until the cat reaches Halliwell; it scratches him and he takes a terrible revenge, which makes the watching Orton smirk. This, as well as being Alfred Molina’s best moment, is unusual in the film in giving a hint of what appealed to Orton about Halliwell at the outset. Otherwise, the older man is a drag, from his pompous RADA audition (a Hamlet soliloquy) onwards. As a result, there’s little suggestion that the protagonists were ever happy together, even though, for the best part of a decade, they sparked sexually. There’s hardly any sense of the excitement the two of them once shared, especially in using language in ways that assaulted conventional sensibilities – the ‘trusty Remington’ their weapon of choice.
In Orton’s life story, it’s almost perfectly fitting that, as Peggy Ramsay says, ‘Prison worked wonders for Joe. Made a man of him if you like’. How much sex he enjoyed behind bars isn’t clear but the film suggests that Orton started bodybuilding while he was inside. (It’s getting difficult to avoid doubles entendres writing this.) His few weeks in jail were the first time in years that he’d been separated from Kenneth Halliwell and marked the beginning of his independence as a writer. But just as he didn’t get round to leaving Halliwell, the two of them never quite parted company as a creative partnership. Orton’s plays have a subversive thrust (no other word for it) in terms of both their moral and sexual anarchism and the language in which this is expressed. ‘Prick Up Your Ears’ – an imperative to audiences and the assaultive method Orton deployed to ensure he was obeyed – was the working title for what would have been his next play. The anagrams of ears include arse. Orton’s diaries recognise the title as one of Halliwell’s best.
4 August 2017
[1] Halliwell predeceased Orton. According to John Lahr, the grapefruit juice used to wash down the pills ‘speeded the twenty-two Nembutals into [Halliwell’s] blood, killing him within thirty seconds … [Orton’s] sheets were still warm when the police discovered him in bed …’
[2] Actually Simon Ward – as the cast list for Prick Up Your Ears acknowledges.
[3] In the published screenplay, it’s Douglas, Joe’s brother, who’s in the mortuary and speaks this line. It’s George in the film.
