‘YOUR EARS’ IS MORE THAN A GAY MURDER TALE

The tension between the two young men was taut, as the one asked the other, softly, “Do you kiss?”

In the straightforward manner with which he directed “My Beautiful Laundrette,” Stephen Frears was setting up a scene for his latest film, “Prick Up Your Ears,” about the life and death of English playwright Joe Orton and his companion of 16 years, Kenneth Halliwell.

In 1967, Halliwell, 41, bludgeoned Orton, 32, to death and then took his own life.

The film, based on the 1978 biography of the same title by author-critic John Lahr, has been adapted for the screen by Alan and Nancy Bennett (“An Englishman Abroad”). Shot on location here during the summer, the film is scheduled to be released by the Samuel Goldwyn Co. next year.

Gary Oldman, now featured as Sid Vicious in “Sid and Nancy,” stars in the film as Orton, the 1960s subculture hero who rose from the English working class to international celebrity with such anti-Establishment plays as “Loot” and “What the Butler Saw.”

British stage actor Alfred Molina co-stars as Halliwell, the unfulfilled artist who supported Orton in his rise, only to be lost in the shadows of the playwright’s success. Vanessa Redgrave is featured as Orton’s longtime literary agent, Peggy Ramsay.

Like Lahr’s book, the film’s script chronicles in explicit terms Orton’s unconventional personal and sexual life--as well as his literary life--and thus risks being branded as a sordid rather than a substantial film.

“We have held out because we wanted to protect the material from stupid exploitation,” said Lahr, who has lived in London since 1974 and is the son of the late actor Burt Lahr.

The writer was explaining why he, Bennett and Frears, who have owned the film rights to the biography since its publication, have regularly rejected offers from film production companies, including the major Hollywood studios, ranging from “a play about an American version of Orton to an English ‘La Cage aux Folles.’ ” According to Lahr, it was just a few months ago that the current deal to make the $1.9-million film was set with England’s Zenith Films, Channel 4 television and Goldwyn.

“It’s an irresistible gamble--the challenge to make a story like this accessible to a movie audience,” said Andrew Brown, producer of the film for Zenith.

“We wanted to do much more than tell the story of a sensational homosexual murder, which is not what made Orton good or even a genius, nor what kept him and Halliwell together all those years,” Lahr said. He was speaking on the set of a “pickup” scene in front of a North London tenement. In this scene Orton, as was frequently the case, picks up a stranger for a menage a trois with Halliwell.

“Orton’s and Halliwell’s life together was as natural to them as a more conventional, heterosexual life is to others,” said Frears, noting that Orton’s story is the story of an artist, as well as a homosexual, who had his own values and lived the way he wanted to live. “Clearly, it was a gay relationship, and right up front we’re saying this is the way it was--no excuses, no parentheses . . . but we are not judging it. We’re trying to explain the kind of behavior that might seem exotic to others, and anything that explains or humanizes tends to undermine people’s prejudices.

“Actually, theirs was much like a heterosexual marriage, with much the same problems.”

Bennett and Lahr observed that their own anti-Establishment attitudes and work have made them well suited to the material. That, they said, was why they wanted to control it.

Lahr said the dynamics of the Orton-Halliwell relationship reminded him of his own marriage and provided echoes of his own past as the son of a famous clown.

He pointed out that his wife, Anthea, for many years put aside her own career as a community worker to support him in his writing career and also edited a large part of his “Notes on a Cowardly Lion.”

“One reason we moved to London,” he said, “is because there seemed to be more equality here,” noting it was far removed from the New York limelight he lived in as a writer.

Added Bennett: “I’ve actually come to feel very sympathetic toward Halliwell. Like a wife who supports a husband up to his success and then is shut out, I think he became desperate.” All three creators of the film said they believed that accounted for the murder. “What happens when you share everything but success?” Lahr asked rhetorically, in speculating on the reasons behind the final outcome of the Orton-Halliwell relationship. “How does fame make one invulnerable to others?”