What Orton Saw, as Twisted Into ‘Butler,’ ‘Loot’

Playwright Joe Orton lived briefly in the hot spotlight of theatrical success. Between 1963, when the BBC optioned his first play, “The Ruffian on the Stair,” and 1966, when “Loot” was heralded as the best play of the year by both the Evening Standard and Plays and Players, a theater review magazine, Orton moved quickly from the ranks of obscurity to center stage, where he was applauded as the most original comic voice of his time.

So original, in fact, that a new adjective was coined to describe his writing--”Ortonesque,” meaning having the quality of macabre outrageousness.

It was a quality that characterized his life as well as his plays. On Aug. 9, 1967, Joe Orton was bludgeoned to death with a hammer by his longtime companion Kenneth Halliwell. Halliwell committed suicide directly after by ingesting 22 Nembutal pills.

The story of his murder made the front page of The Times of London, and Orton became more famous for his death than for his life.

Not only were the details of his demise suitably grisly and bizarre to decorate the pages of the British tabloids, but the history of Orton’s short life, as revealed through his diaries, was steamy enough to keep the public hot for a good two years. In 1969, when Orton’s masterwork, “What the Butler Saw,” premiered in London, it was shouted down by an angry assault from the gallery.

But Orton is having the last laugh.

All three of his full-length plays have become staples in theater repertoire. This month, Orange County will see the opening of two of Orton’s irreverent farces: “Loot” at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa and “What the Butler Saw” at the Laguna Playhouse in Laguna Beach.

Not that all this respectability would have pleased Orton. He enjoyed the fray. He even wrote incendiary letters to the newspapers under a nom de plume. As Mrs. Edna Welthorpe, Orton condemned his own plays, then turned around and wrote rebuttals under the name of Donald H. Hartley.

He was a mischievous anarchist, a boy brought up in poverty who wanted to create a “seismic disturbance,” to “lock the enemy in a room somewhere and fire the sentence at him.”

He had started out with Halliwell writing novels. They had met at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and, after a disappointing season in pursuit of work as actors, they settled in London and began to write.

At first Halliwell was the commanding literary voice. He tutored Orton in the classics, and together they turned out a number of books, all of which languished, unpublished.

But in 1962, Orton and Halliwell cadged their first bit of fame: They were arrested for defacing public property. They had removed illustrations from library art books to decorate the walls of their tiny flat in Islington--83 books and 1,653 plates in all.

Orton had also augmented more than a few book jackets with original commentaries, mildly obscene ones, and rearranged pictures and captions for comedic shock effect. Then, like a true man of the theater, he would return the books to the library shelves and wait to enjoy the scene when the unsuspecting patron reacted to his work.

They each served six months in prison. Orton’s incarceration only radicalized his naturally anarchistic sense of humor. He summed up his time behind bars with the comment: “The old whore society lifted up her skirts, and the stench was pretty foul.”

“Being in the nick,” Orton wrote, “brought detachment to my writing. I wasn’t involved anymore, and it suddenly worked.” Within a year of his release from prison, Orton sold “Ruffian” to the BBC.

He began to write in earnest. “Entertaining Mr. Sloane” was staged a year later. Then came “Loot” and the best-play awards. And always, there was a public uproar.

“Loot” centers around a pair of inept robbers, a scheming nurse, an unscrupulous detective and a dead body. “Anything is legal with a corpse,” insists one character, and that credo may well have served as Orton’s guidepost as he wrote this wickedly funny romp in which greed triumphs.

Orton understood man as a creature of appetites, and, to the dismay of his detractors, he created characters who know no bounds in their lustful pursuits of money and sex.

“People think I write fantasy,” Orton said, “but I don’t; some things are exaggerated or distorted in the same way that painters distort and alter things, but they’re realistic figures. They’re perfectly recognizable.” “Every one of the characters must be real,” Orton insisted in his production notes. “Every line should be played with desperate seriousness and a complete lack of any suggestion of humor. Only in this way can a mixture of comedy and menace be achieved.”

As proof, one night shortly after his mother had died, Orton appeared backstage during a performance of “Loot.”

One of the characters handles, as a stage property, his recently deceased mother’s false teeth. Orton handed the actor his own dead mother’s actual dentures. “Here,” he said, “I thought you’d like the originals.”

Once the actor understood what the playwright had put into his hand, he “looked very sick,” Orton reported in his diary. “You see,” Orton told the actor, “it’s obvious that you’re not thinking of the events of the play in terms of reality if a thing affects you like that.”

Obviously, not all the theater-going public concurred with Orton’s assessment of man as a creature without “basic human values.” But he wrote what he knew.

As Orton’s fame grew, Halliwell became consumed with jealousy, vacillating between violent rage and immobilizing depression. While dealing with Halliwell’s psychosis and arranging for him to be treated by psychiatrists, Orton was writing his last and most accomplished play, “What the Butler Saw,” which takes place in a sanitarium.

In the play, Dr. Rance, a government inspector, is investigating Dr. Prentice’s institution for the insane.

“My tutor was a remarkable man,” Rance boasts. “Having failed to achieve madness himself, he took to teaching it to others.”

Prentice: And you were his prize pupil? Rance: There were some more able than I. Prentice: Where are they now? Rance: In mental institutions. Prentice: Running them? Rance: For the most part.

* “Loot” by Joe Orton opens tonight at 8 at South Coast Repertory, Second Stage, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Show times: 8 p.m. Tuesday through Friday; 2:30 and 8 p.m. Saturday; 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Sunday. Through Oct. 24. $23 to $33. A Pay What You Will performance, for which patrons can choose their own ticket price ($5 minimum), is Saturday at 2:30 p.m. (714) 957-4033. * Laguna Playhouse offers previews of “What the Butler Saw” by Joe Orton on Tuesday and Wednesday at 8 p.m. at the Moulton Theatre, 606 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach. Preview tickets: $13. Admission for the regular run, Thursday through Oct. 24, is $16 to $20. Show times: Tuesday through Saturday at 8 p.m.; Sunday at 7 p.m. (except Oct. 24) with matinees at 2 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays beginning Oct. 9. A signed performance for the hearing impaired will be given Oct. 3 at 7 p.m. (714) 494-8021.