Overview

John Lahr, New Yorker critic, novelist, and biographer reconstructs both the life and death of Joe Orton, an extraordinary and anarchic playwright, whose plays scandalised and delighted the public, and whose indecisive loyalty to a friend caused his tragic and untimely death. 'I have high hopes of dying in my prime,' Joe Orton confided to his diary in July, 1967. Less than one month later, Britain's most promising comic playwright was murdered by his lover in the London flat they had shared for fifteen years. In PRICK UP YOUR EARS, originally chosen Book of the Year by Truman Capote and Nobel Prize-winning novelist Patrick White when it first appeared in 1978, Lahr chronicles Orton's working-class childhood and stage struck adolescence, the scandals and disasters of his early professional years, and the brief, glittering success of his blistering comedies, ENTERTAINING MR. SLOANE, LOOT, and WHAT THE BUTLER SAW.

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9780747560142

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Reviews

One of the most remarkable diaries ever to be published in modern times, this book was produced, in manuscript, at the inquest on the deaths of Joe Orton, the brilliant young British playwright, and his lover, the ambitious but failed writer Kenneth Halliwell, who had battered Orton to death and then committed suicide. The diary covers the years during which, with the production of his best-known plays bringing financial success after a life of considerable hardship, Orton was living the life of extravagant, promiscuous homosexual, Orton's vivid descriptions of his sexual liaisons in London 'cottages' and his brief intense affairs with Arab boys while on holiday were among the most sensational ever to be published when the book came out 20 years ago. It was not Orton's affairs, but his apparent scorn of his friend's literary ambition that seemes to have driven Halliwell to murder. The book offers an extraordinary insight into a curious, tortured, extremely funny man (the humour is wickedly effective), and the long biographical preface by John Lahr an additional insight into the character of one of Britain's finest farceurs. (Kirkus UK)

Author Information

John Lahr has been writing about theatre and popular culture for THE NEW YORKER since 1992. He is the author of sixteen books, among them DAME EDNA EVERAGE AND THE RISE OF WESTERN CIVILISATION: BACKSTAGE WITH BARRY HUMPHRIES, NOTES ON A COWARDLY LION: THE BIOGRAPHY OF BERT LAHR and SHOW AND TELL, John Lahr divides his time between New York and London.

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