Title

See–Thru Desire And The Dream Of Gay Marriage: Orton’S Entertaining Mr. Sloane On Stage And Screen

Abstract

Joe Orton’s first brush with fame arose not through drama, but through crime. Between 1959 and 1962 he and his lover, Kenneth Halliwell, engaged in a series of clandestine assaults on public decency. They stole hundreds of books from the Islington and Hampstead public libraries; once back in their shared flat, they altered the book-jacket illustrations and added less than respectful blurbs to previously blank jacket flaps. They then snuck the volumes back into the libraries. When they were eventually arrested and found guilty of vandalism, the news made a headline in the Daily Mirror. Read sympathetically, Orton and Halliwell’s acts of apparent literary vandalism were in fact acts of cultural criticism: they tended to deface books they considered hopelessly middlebrow, and their scrapes with obscenity obviously critique bourgeois sexual repression. But aside from the artifacts themselves, the acts of vandalism can also be seen as Orton’s first explorations of performance-based art. After having spent most of the 1950s writing unpublishable novels, both with Halliwell and by himself, this was a movement, in its own small way, toward the public sphere. For Orton liked not only to place the altered volumes back onto the shelves, but then to loiter about the libraries in order to observe the shock and dismay of patrons as they discovered the nature of the changes. This was undoubtedly his first experience of watching an audience confront his work.

Publication Date

1-1-2011

Publication Title

Modern British Drama on Screen

Number of Pages

145-168

Document Type

Article; Book Chapter

Personal Identifier

scopus

DOI Link

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511734311.009

Socpus ID

84923441680 (Scopus)

Source API URL

https://api.elsevier.com/content/abstract/scopus_id/84923441680

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